when I type 'man any_topic> I get misaligned pages, plus some escape chars, such as 7m<80><99>word<7m<80><90>, are not interpreted by the terminal. I run RedHat(enterprise edition 4) with KDE's Konsole. The /etc/man.config file looks good to me (but what do I know?!), and I tried different setting for KDE Konsole to no avail. Plus every line in man displayed with a number, which is not normal plain 'man'. I guess there is some setting somewhere which twists the output. I'd be very thankful to anybody who has ideas.

What locales are you using? They might do odd stuff for your console..and which shell are you running, bash or sh or ksh or what?

I am using BASH, and output of the 'locale' is:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=

This is the kind of output you would get if you used man with the -t option (or if a setting somewhere in the MAN environment variables is to use that option).

Try 'man -D <some man page>' to see what you get.

I figured out my problem. The pager used for 'man' is 'less'. I looked at my environment variables and discovered that I have settings for LESSCHARSET='latin1', LESS='-i -N -w -z-4 -g -e -M -X -F -R' coming from my .bashrc file, which I acquired from the WEB while ago without really looking, tweaking and understanding portions which I don't use.

I commented out LESSCHARSET, and LESS and it solved the problem. Little things create huge problems!
(some say if Napoleon didn't have a cold he might have won Waterloo)

Thanks for the tips. Looking at the output of 'man -d some_command' gave me the idea.