[PLUG] manpage mangling

[Paul Heinlein]

On Mon, 19 May 2008, Michael Ewan wrote:

> Paul Mullen wrote:
>> On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 11:54:35AM -0700, Russell Senior wrote:
>>
>>> I noticed a while back that manpages on one of my (debian) desktop 
>>> boxes have mangled rendering due to uninterpretted terminal 
>>> control codes in an xterm, e.g. (randomly) from the jhead manpage:
>>>
>>
>> Mine does the same thing. It seems to have something to do with 
>> character sets and locales. I have $LANG set to "en_US.UTF-8". 
>> Setting it to "C" produces readable man pages.
>>
>>
> I have found that most strange text in man pages can be rendered 
> properly by doing export LC_ALL=C in your shell.  As stated above, 
> it's a local problem.  As side effect of LC_ALL=C is that ls will 
> sort ascii, so case and dot files sort as we're used to.

LC_COLLATE is the variable that determines sort order. I set it to "C" 
in all shells to get the traditional ls listings. (LC_ALL is the trump 
card of locale variables, overriding LANG and LC_*.)

My assessment is that you'd be better off fixing your UTF-8 display 
issues than ignoring them by forcing everything to ASCII.

Does locale(1) show that you have en_US.utf8 stuff installed?

   locale -a | grep ^en_US

On Debian systems, /etc/locale.gen determines what locales get built 
when libc is updated.

Debian also includes a validlocale(8) utility that can be handy. On 
this system, I've got American English Unicode installed, but not 
native German (my forebears would be aghast!):

   [heinlein at monk ~]$ validlocale en_US.UTF-8
   locale 'en_US.UTF-8' valid and available
   [heinlein at monk ~]$ validlocale de_DE.UTF-8
   locale 'de_DE.UTF-8' not available
   de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8

The very last line -- "de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8" -- is what I would add to 
/etc/locale.gen if I wanted to make German available. Then I'd run 
locale-gen(8) to bootstrap the new locale.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> http://www.madboa.com/