Re: UTF-8 locale, strange chars in X terminal pager(s), specifically man pages

From: Vincent Lefevre (vincent_at_vinc17.org)
Date: 09/30/04

  • Next message: Francois Cerbelle: "Re: installed but not installed according to dpkg" 
    Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:39:50 +0200
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

    On 2004-09-30 00:03:49 -0500, Frederick B. Henry Jr. wrote:
    > Since switching my locale to en_US.UTF-8 (dpkg-reconfigure locales),
    > whenever I use any pager (more, less, most) to read a man page I get
    > strange chars, e.g.:
    >
    > man procmailrc (PAGER=/usr/bin/most) yields:
    >
    > "delivering and nonâ@~^Pdelivering recipes.."

    In an UTF-8 sequence, you shouldn't have a ^P; this is strange.
    Now, Debian doesn't use the non-ASCII hyphen to make searching in
    man pages easier (see /etc/groff/man.local). So, this seems to be
    a bug in the procmailrc page (or perhaps the non-ASCII hyphen is
    normal in this special context).

    On my machine, I don't see any problem, perhaps because I have
    uncommented the last two lines of

    . \" Many UTF-8 man pages use "-" instead of "\-" for dashes such as those
    . \" in command-line options. This is a bug in those pages, but if you want
    . \" all hyphens to be rendered as the ASCII-compatible HYPHEN-MINUS
    . \" anyway, then uncomment this.
    . \" if '\*[.T]'utf8' \
    . \" char - \N'45'

    (more precisely, I copied both files from /etc/groff to $HOME/etc/groff,
    uncommented these lines and set GROFF_TMAC_PATH to "$HOME/etc/groff").

    BTW, I've tried after unsetting GROFF_TMAC_PATH, and this non-ASCII
    hyphen (shorter than the ASCII one) displays without any problem (in
    a UXTerm, i.e. XTerm with UTF-8 locales and UTF-8 fonts).

    > Is there some specific font I should be using? How do I get a clean
    > man page in an xterm/aterm/rxvt/mlterm with a UTF-8 locale?

    If you use UXTerm, the fonts are already set up:
    /etc/X11/app-defaults/XTerm contains

    *VT100.utf8Fonts.font2: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--8-80-75-75-c-50-iso10646-1
    *VT100.utf8Fonts.font: -misc-fixed-medium-r-semicondensed--13-120-75-75-c-60-iso10646-1
    *VT100.utf8Fonts.font3: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--14-130-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1
    *VT100.utf8Fonts.font4: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--13-120-75-75-c-80-iso10646-1
    *VT100.utf8Fonts.font5: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--18-120-100-100-c-90-iso10646-1
    *VT100.utf8Fonts.font6: -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--20-200-75-75-c-100-iso10646-1 

    -- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.org> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / SPACES project at LORIA
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