Bug 78379 - man displays garbled characters in xterm
Summary: man displays garbled characters in xterm
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Linux
Classification: Retired
Component: xterm-color
Version: 8.0
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Nalin Dahyabhai
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2002-11-21 22:47 UTC by Dan Kegel
Modified: 2007-04-18 16:48 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2005-10-13 01:10:10 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Dan Kegel 2002-11-21 22:47:41 UTC
Description of problem:
man displays garbled characters in xterm when man is outputting
UTF-8, even if xterm's utf-8 support is enabled

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
rpm -q -f `which xterm` reports XFree86-4.2.0-72
xterm -version reports XFree86 4.2.0(165)
rpm -q -f `which konsole` kdebase-3.0.3-13

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. run xterm or konsole
2. type 'man man'
3. note that all hyhpens in output are garbled
4. run xterm -u8
5. type 'man man'
6. note that all hyphens in output are invisible
	

Additional info:

This is not a bug in man; it's a bug in xterm.
A similar bug exists in konsole; see
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=73810
(and http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38347
which snidely says RTFM despite the fact that
the doc for konsole says absolutely nothing about utf-8)

One workaround is to give the command
  export LANG=c
Another is to run gnome-terminal, which handles
utf-8 properly.

This problem is related to the following other bugzilla entries:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=70381 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=70733 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=72592 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=75702
which mistakenly blame the problem on man.

Comment 1 Michael Lee Yohe 2002-11-22 18:41:21 UTC
Refer to Bug 78392 for a workaround.

Comment 2 Thomas E. Dickey 2003-01-27 01:22:06 UTC
I thought this was obvious - but for the record, Redhat should have rolled
the uxterm script's resources into xterm if they chose to set a UTF-8 locale
system-wide. See

http://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_160

(anyone can run uxterm, but some people insist on it being called "xterm")


Comment 3 Ben LaHaise 2003-02-19 16:31:37 UTC
Additionally, running xterm with -u8 still results in some characters not being
displayed correctly: for example, the AUTHORS section of man xterm appears
different on xterm -u8 as compared with gnome-terminal.

Comment 4 Thomas E. Dickey 2003-02-20 00:11:12 UTC
apparently no one read (or understood) my comment.

Comment 5 Jason Vas Dias 2005-10-13 01:10:10 UTC
I cannot reproduce this problem with the latest rawhide version xterm-205-1 , 
using uxterm or the LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 locale and xterm -u8 . Hence, this 
bug is being closed . If it is still a problem for you, please re-open.



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