Strange "characters" appearing in auto "created" man pages
 

Hello people

If I use:
I see what I am supposed to see, for example:
Now if I create a text file with:
and then look at it, I see:
Does anyone know why and is there a fix?

Garbled symbols are a sure sign of a conflict in character encodings. The file is probably either being created in an encoding that can't handle those characters, or it's being created correctly and the display program is set to use the wrong encoding. Do you get the same effect no matter what text reader or editor you use? If not, then my first guess is that the file is being created using utf-8, but the text display is trying to use something else, such as Western European (iso-8859-1).

If all programs show the same problem, then the source is likely the encoding used when the file is created; in which case I couldn't off-hand tell you why it's doing that exactly or how to fix it. The same command works just fine for me.

Please run the "locale" command and post the results, so we can see what encoding your shell is set to.

Are you sure, that a "troff" document can be converted to
text just like that. I don't think so.

http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools/troff.1b.html

http://vmlinux.org/cgi-bin/dwww?type...cation=TROFF/1
.....

That is what the man command does. Convert troff documents to text in your terminal. Changing the encoding of your terminal to utf8 would resolve strange characters when reading a manpage.

You may have a document that is intended to be printed instead of viewed in the terminal. But this wouldn't be the case for man pages.

It may be better to do something like this:
man --pager=cat --encoding=utf8 ><topic>.txt <topic>

You could create a oneliner in ~/bin/ or use an alias

alias man2txt='man --pager=cat --encoding=utf8'

man2txt smb.conf

#!/bin/bash
topic="$1"
man --pager=cat --encoding=utf8 $topic >${topic}.txt

p.s. No, I didn't change my signature just for this post. I had it previously.

Hi David the H., Thanks for the response.

I see UTF-8 in there, Geany tells me the file is: ISO-8859-1

But the file I created "copying" the terminal output to a text tile is: UTF-8 (without BOM) and both gedit and geany read the strange characters in the first file.

Hi knudfl, thanks for responding, I'll check those links out.

I had to reinstall lately and was looking at the aptitude man pages when I decided that I wanted it as a text tile, and that's the result. Strange thing is about 50% of the time I get these strange characters.

They are usually a single quote: ( ' ) a double quote but not the "text" ones ( " ) these look like a ( 66 ) and ( 99 ) if you get my drift, and the hyphen ( - ).

A search and replace fixes it but it is a "process" I could do without.

Hi jschiwal,

Terminator is configured to use UTF-8 and I've never had the problem when "reading" in a terminal just with reading the text file:

I tried your man2txt above and ended up with the same strange characters.

Cute, I'm doing 110 things at once and just saw what you were talking about. Works nice except I don't use KDE. Evince can read the .ps file but not like you have in your sig. :)

I'm going to play with that though. I would much rather have text files, I can read them easier and edit things (add nots etc - for personal use.)

Another thanks for you.