I think in a previous life I've fixed this but I cannot recall how.

When displaying man pages (mostly or entirely), the single-quote characters see to get changed to ==>’<== or just ==>â€<== on the screen. In fact, the "TM" character is blank on screen, it showed up as "TM" when I pasted it here.

Thanks for helping.

Rather a Linux expert found a way (probably 2 months sooner than I would); BTW these are RHE v4 and V5 systems on which the problem occurred.

Near the very end of /usr/bin/nroff is

/usr/bin/iconv -f ${charset_in} -t utf-8 ${TMPFILE} | \
/usr/bin/groff -mtty-char -Tutf8 $opts 2>/dev/null | \
/usr/bin/iconv -f utf-8 -t ${charset_out}//translit

which my resident expert changed to

#/usr/bin/iconv -f ${charset_in} -t utf-8 ${TMPFILE} |
/usr/bin/groff -mtty-char -Tascii $opts 2>/dev/null < ${TMPFILE}
# /usr/bin/iconv -f utf-8 -t ${charset_out}//translit

(the TMPFILE is created earlier in nroff)

I am of course, as a non-expert (yet ;^) not recommending this but posting it for everyone's "benefit." Closed course, professional driver, do not attempt, yada yada yada.

Thanks for reading!

You can just change /etc/man.config

Thanks mucho - that works a treat on RHE V5. On V4, however, I needed BOTH the fix to nroff *I* posted, as well as THIS change to /etc/man.config:

#NROFF nroff --legacy NROFF_OLD_CHARSET -man
NROFF groff -Tascii -man

Thank you again, Billy.

I am running CentOS 5.2 where I see the same problem in the man pages, where a single-quote appears as character 'a' with a mark above it. I tried the following solutions earlier given by experts on this thread.

(a) In /etc/man.config

#NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -c -Tascii --legacy NROFF_OLD_CHARSET -mandoc 2>/dev/null
NROFF /usr/bin/groff -c -Tascii -mandoc 2>/dev/null

(b) In /usr/bin/nroff

#/usr/bin/iconv -f ${charset_in} -t utf-8 ${TMPFILE} |
/usr/bin/groff -mtty-char -Tascii $opts 2>/dev/null < ${TMPFILE}
# /usr/bin/iconv -f utf-8 -t ${charset_out}//translit

(c) In /etc/man.config

#NROFF nroff --legacy NROFF_OLD_CHARSET -man
NROFF groff -Tascii -man

And also (a) + (b) together.

None of these seem to work. Can someone suggest a solution that works on CentOS 5.2?

My solution worked for me in CentOS 5.2

Is groff installed?