From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i686) Description of problem: The Japanese extension to less-358 has broken the program's handling of non-ASCII "European" character sets. There are at least three problems, none of which is found in the vanilla version of less-358. 1. The program checks the LESSCHARDEF environment variable to see if the file is binary, but ignores it in displaying actual characters. 2. The program ignores line-edit literals specified in .less when these invoke "high" characters (>127). 3. The program prefaces sequences of one or "high" characters with a capital "A". This effect only appears on some terminal emulators (rxvt and PuTTY). How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.$ /usr/X11R6/bin/rxvt -fn 6x13 & (In rxvt:) 2.$ export LESSCHARDEF=8bcccbcc18b95.b # ASCII charset1 3.Create the following /tmp/lesskey file (the last char is Latin 1 a-grave): #line-edit \e[24~1 literal a \e[24~2 literal ` 4.$ /usr/bin/lesskey -o /tmp/less /tmp/lesskey 5.$ /usr/bin/less -k /tmp/less /usr/share/texmf/doc/help/faq/LaTeX-FAQ-francaise/part1 6.Look for accented characters in the text 7.Press "/" to search, then F12, "1", F12, "2" Actual Results: The French accented characters appear normally, except that each character or character-sequence is preceded by a "A". The literal "a" is inserted into the search string, but the a-grave does not appear. Expected Results: The French accented characters should be marked as binary by the LESSCHARDEF setting and should therefore appear as white-on-black hex sequences in angle brackets. When the characters do appear, they should not be preceded by an "A" in rxvt. The a-grave should be inserted into the search string in the same way as the "a". Additional info:
This patch also breaks input of cyrillic characters (everywhere - in console, xterm etc). The patch is too big to dig into, so I think it's better to just exclude it from non-Japanese versions of RHL.
Bug 1) and 3) are fixed in rawhide. The maintainer has been notified about 2)