Red Hat man pages and escape sequences

[Ben Scott]

On 2/19/06, Bill Mullen <moon at lunarhub.com> wrote:
>>   What's the fix for when Red Hat derived systems (in the current
>> case, my Fedora Core 4 desktop) display crap in man pages?
>
> [Suggestion of dumping FC for $OTHERDISTRO reconsidered and omitted.]

  Avoiding controversy and debate?  Come now.  You're setting a
dangerous precedent.  ;)

>>   This smells like a Unicode issue to me.
>
> Likewise - and that's one funky aroma, ain't it? Gack. ;-)

  *GRIN*

> Does setting "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" (what my Mandrake systems call it) or
> "LANG=en_US.utf8" (what my Gentoo box calls it) make any difference?

  Either fixes the problem.  Woo-who!  Thanks!  I knew it was an easy
fix like that, I just couldn't remember what.

  I have LANG=C in my ~/.bash_profile file to change other behaviors;
that's doubtless where the problem comes from.

> I don't have any experience with FC, but I'd be interested to know which
> man pages display this way ...

  Pretty much all of them.  For example, the "NAME" section typically
has what I assume is the Unicode em dash character between the name
and the one-line description.  Without the proper environment magic,
that character does not display properly.

  I'm pretty sure this is due to something Red Hat does when creating
their man pages.  I know Red Hat has done a lot of work to switch to
Unicode to support internationalization and localization efforts,
that's an admirable thing.  I suspect that, since they had gone to all
that effort, they took the opportunity to make use of the "fancy"
characters available in Unicode.  I can't really argue against that,
either.  It does make things a bit trickier for character set Luddites
like me, though.  :)

-- Ben "7-bit characters were good enough to go to the moon" Scott