Encoding in nroff and man

[Karl Larsen]

Yevgeniy Makarov wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am using FC7, and I discovered an apparent inconsistency in handling
> encodings by nroff and man. If there is another place where I should
> address this question, I would appreciate if you let me know.
> 
> I noticed the issue of encoding in man because I am using Midnight
> Commander which is apparently only able to use 8-bit encodings for
> output. As a result, I had some garbage where single quotation marks
> should have been when I viewed man pages in MC (using M-! key). The
> reason was that these single quotation marks were Unicode characters
> taking more than one byte.
> 
> Looking at /etc/man.config, I saw that man uses
> 
> /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc 2>/dev/null
> 
> command to process man files. Since the man page for nroff says that
> it accepts the option -T<encoding>, I thought I would add the option
> "-Tlatin1", but it did not make any difference. Looking inside nroff,
> which is a shell script, it seems that it ignores the -T option:
> 
> case $1 in
>     ...
>     -[eq] | -s* | -u* | -T* )
>       # ignore these options
>       ;;
> 
> Further, there seems to be only one place where the nroff script
> determines the value of charset_out variable, and that is from the
> "locale charmap" command, even though nroff man page says that it also
> tries  LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE,  LANG, and LESSCHARSET environment variables.
> 
> When I replaced the nroff command with groff, the -Tlatin1 option
> worked and I was able to obtain the man page in latin1 encoding.
> 
> Of course, I can set LC_ALL to en_US.iso88591, but I may want to have
> Unicode in Xterm when I am not running MC, and, secondly, this does
> not eliminate the mismatch between the nroff man page and the actual
> behavior of nroff.
> 
> I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
> 
> Evgeny
> 
	It sounds to me the title is wrong. I read man and info in a terminal. 
Using Midnight Commander is not my way. In anycase the title should be 
that MC can't display man pages.

	You have done a lot of work getting MC to work.


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.