Red Hat man pages and escape sequences

[Ben Scott]

  What's the fix for when Red Hat derived systems (in the current
case, my Fedora Core 4 desktop) display crap in man pages?

  This typically manifests as a highlighted printed representation of
non-printable escape codes, and/or non-English characters, where one
would normally expect dashes, quotes, and the like.

  This smells like a Unicode issue to me.

  I know I've seen the fix for this before, but I can't remember
where, and Google just finds a lot of discussion and bitching, and in
this case, I just want the damn thing to work.

  Tried KDE konsole, GNOME gnome-terminal, xterm -- all fail in some
way.  Tried setting LANG=C and unsetting LANG, no change.  Tried
cursing loudly; didn't help, but made me feel a little better.

-- Ben "When I was young, we only had 127 characters, and we liked it
that way" Scott