wrong characters in man, info pages

skola · 05-25-2010, 07:53 AM

Running a test setup of the latest Arch and installed only the base from the cd. This obviously is just an init 3 terminal and I chose my locale and fonts correctly.

On looking at certain man and info pages - pacman and ifconfig plus
some others - I noticed that I didn't see some characters and they showed up as a question mark ?, BUT it was black on a grey background, all the other letters/chars being grey.

A) In man pacman, under DESCRIPTION the 2nd paragraph has a line shown like this: ?Arch Linux Package Management?

B) And, if you scroll down to the option -r, --root <'path'>
this is how it is shown:

Specify an alternative installation root (default is ?'/''). This should not be used as a way to install software into ''/usr/local?' instead of ?/usr?. This option is used if you want to install a package on a temporary mounted partition which is "owned" by another system.

C) On some info pages where a long word came to the r.h. edge and was hyphenated, instead of seeing hyphen- I see hyphen? again black on a grey b/g.

I also have a Suse setup on this disk and booted to it to check the name of the fonts and keyb map, and they were the same as the Arch. I copied the pacman.8.gz and ifconfig.8.gz into the Suse /man8 and invoked them in turn. Sure enough they looked ok and I could see what the missing chars were.

The Arch man display is giving the ? for double quotes " and an apostrophe ' (left and right oriented kind) , but not all the time.

In Suse, that first example above at A) it shows the double quotes " correctly, but back in Arch it doesn't BUT scroll down and it shows them around the word "owned" as in example B).

And example B) shows the discrepancy with the single quote or apostrophe, sometimes seen correctly, sometimes as a ?.

It's obviously not translating certain characters according to their coding. Using the numlock and keying alt+34 gives the d/qoutes ". Doing alt+39 is apostrophe ' and alt+96 is the left apsotrophe '. The ? I'm seeing is alt+128.

I looked in the /usr/share/kbd dirs and the mans about loadunimap and setfont and tried running those to see any change but no luck.

any hints appreciated.

bartonski · 05-26-2010, 08:39 AM

I wasn't entirely sure what controlled the character set, but I figured that it had to be a shell variable, and I figured that it was either UTF-8 or ISO/IEC 8859 (aka Latin1)... so I ran the following:

Code:

$ set | egrep -i 'utf|iso'
GDM_LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

A quick trip to the Bash man pages yielded the following:

Code:

       LANG   Used to determine the  locale  category  for  any category  not
              specifically selected with a variable starting with LC_.
       LC_ALL This  variable  overrides  the  value  of LANG and any other LC_
              variable specifying a locale category.

So... I would take a look at the values of $LANG and $LC_ALL, just to see where you stand.

Also, what type of terminal are you using? gnome terminal? xterm?

skola · 05-27-2010, 06:44 PM

hi there and thanks.

As it happens I got stuck into some other stuff needing doing so I'm writin this away from that test setup with Arch. However, I had changed from the default US to my own en_GB and using latin1 which was alright on the Suse partition on that disk. I did use the commands to change mappings and there was no change or worse change!

For your q's. The Suse was a terminal in Gnome (terrible in Suse but it's only a trial) and as I said, the Arch was just the base install from the cd which only gives init 3 bash.

I'll get back to it later this morning (!) and have another go.