Incorrect Man Page display.

[Tom Ward_1]

Hello,

I'm running RedHat 9 on a headless PC. I normally connect in via an xterm with ssh. I'm getting strange characters on my man pages where I should have an apostrophe.

emacs' will shows up as emacsâ Â
That didn't paste correctly. It actaully looks like emacs^[square box][square box]

In gnome-term the apostrophe will show up as an a with a ^ on top.

Does anyone know why this happens, and how I can fix t

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

What type of font do you use in your terms? Does it maybe not use the ISO-Latin-1 (or 15) encoding?

Greetings, Martin

[Tom Ward_1]

Ctrl-rt mouse button shows default. I don't know just what font that is. Can you tell me how to check it?

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

I don't know how to check the font, but you could try to force a font on your xterm to check by selecting a font that should be right and use the same menu and use the option selection.

Before that, check your TERM variable. And you could try to get to the manual page file (should be something like /usr/man/man1/emacs.1, /usr/man/man1.Z/emacs.1) and do:
groff -man emacs.1 | less
or
gzip -cd emacs.1 | groff -man | less

That way a broken formatted file will be ignored. If it works with the above command, remove the emacs file from the cat1 or cat1.Z directory.

[Martin P.J. Zinser · Accepted solution]

Reading the friendly manual it seems xterm is UTF-8 aware by now. Check the entries for lc locale et al. You might need to play around with your LC_* and LANG environment variables.

All the best,

Martin

[Tom Ward_1]

Martin was on the right track. A coworker nailed it. I can't explain exactly what they all mean, but this works.

cat /etc/sysconfig/i18n
#LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANG="en_US.iso885915"
#SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en"
SUPPORTED="en_US.iso885915:en_US:en"
#SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
SYSFONT="lat0-sun16"
SYSFONTACM="iso15"

[Stuart Browne]

The reason was that your xterm application isn't understanding Unicode correctly.

Changing the LANG environment is the usual fix.