RedHat 8 - strange characters in man pages?

[Jeff]

I installed RedHat 8.0 over Thanksgiving on an old Pentium Pro computer to test with. Everything went ok during the install - no errors and everything else seems to work well, seti is running, apache is running, up2date ran ok to update everything to current. Today however I wanted to view some man pages, and noticed that they seem "corrupted" or there is some other character issue:

http://marinearchitecture.com/temp/man.gif

http://marinearchitecture.com/temp/tar.gif

Any idea what the cause of this might be or the easy solution - does this indicate some overall corruption during the install, or might the man pages be isolated or is it something really simple?

[Jeff]

OK, the "weird" man pages are only if I connect to the box via ssh but they look fine if I connect a keyboard & monitor and login locally. The strange thing is that everything else looks and works fine via ssh, top, directory listings, etc; only the man pages are "corrupt" when viewed via ssh. Very strange...

[Arthur]

This has to do with font encoding, the man pages in RedHat 8 are in UTF-8 format (Unicode).

The following should solve your problem;
In /etc/sysconfig/i18n change LANG="en_US.UTF-8" to LANG="en_US"

If that doesn't do the trick you can try changing the line NROFF /usr/bin/groff -c -mandoc in /etc/man.config to NROFF /usr/bin/groff -Tlatin1 -mandoc.

Arthur

[Jeff]

Thank you thank you!

If that doesn't do the trick you can try changing the line NROFF /usr/bin/groff -c -mandoc in /etc/man.config to NROFF /usr/bin/groff -Tlatin1 - mandoc.

That did it. Much appreciated.

Mine was actually NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc to start.

--and some people say the man pages aren't written in English

[Rez]

Thanks, that worked for me too. Later.

[kitchin]

In case you just want to remove the bad characters from a man file:

Say you telnet to FQ and type
man tar > tar.txt
where tar is any command you want info on. Then you download tar.txt to your friendly Win98 computer. Well, it will be really hard to read because it is full of ASCII character #8 (backspace), followed by an underscore. That's for underlining.

This is my Delphi/Pascal code to fix it, which you can adapt to your favorite language:

     if not eof(infile) then begin
         read(infile, prevch);

         while not eof (infile) do begin
           read (infile, ch);
           if (ch<>#8) and (prevch<>#8) then begin
             write(outfile, prevch);
           end;
           prevch:=ch;
         end;

         write (outfile, prevch);
     end;

I will even send you the working exe file if you want it.

Nowadays, I find Googling on "man tar" is almost as good, but you may not get it for the exact version of Unix you want.

[ricke999]

Worked for me too, thanks!