Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 80544
Viewing manpages unusable for technical workstation purpose.
Last modified: 2008-01-17 12:49:42 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021218 Description of problem: Since the introduction of Red Hat 8.0 a lot of manpages are unreadable. I think this is a i18n issue, but as I see that Phoebe still has this problem I wanted to make a bugreport for this against Phoebe, although I know there are already a lot of open Bugzilla reports of i18n issues. For any serious technical workstation usage of Red Hat Linux it is *vital* that any information from - in this case - manpages is 100% readable, and not, as seen in the attached screenshot, full of weird characters. For example, I'm playing with SNMP to suck out information from UPS'es and Cisco switches for monitoring purposes. Of course reading a manpage is really part of the job when doing this, but for me reading a manpage at the moment is a big undertaking 'an sich' due to translating all strange characters into what they should be. I really hope that there will be a solution for this problem since I see Red Hat evolving into a really important player in the Unix field for the years to come, but this kind of problems must really be tackled first. ps.1.I didn't knew under what package to bugzilla this, "man" looked most appropriate. ps.2 I hope that this Bugzilla did not sound too much like a rant. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. "man snmpwalk" in a KDE session. 2. 3. Actual Results: Some characters in manpages are unrecognisable. Expected Results: Manpages should be easy to read Additional info:
Created attachment 88953 [details] Screenshot of garbled manpage characters Section A shows that old X apps like xterm have this feature. Section B shows that new X apps like konsole have this feature.
Hmm.. I changed my KDE 'konsole' font to "Lucidatypewriter". With this font the example I gave with "man snmpwalk" makes at least the manpage a lot more easy to read. Strange, however, that a default xterm with it's unaliased fonts has trouble with the - character in "man snmpwalk".
I reported some problems with the hyphen character ("-") in bug 75193. I imagine it would be useful to know which man pages are affected in the same way as snmpwalk(1), whether snmpwalk was provided by a Red Hat package, and which version of that package you have installed. I assume your locale or language is set to use Unicode/UTF-8. What are the values of LC_ALL and LANG? I have no authority to ask these questions, I'm just trying to help. Feel free to ignore me. :-)
Here's some information of my internationalisation settings : [peterve@powermate peterve]$ cat /etc/sysconfig/i18n LANG="nl_NL.UTF-8" SUPPORTED="nl_NL.UTF-8:nl_NL:nl:en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en" SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16" If I do a "man ls" in an xterm, I also have the problem of the missing "-" characters. When I'm doing the same command in a virtual console, the "-" characters are, however, displayed properly. The SNMP package is the one supplied with Phoebe "net-snmp-5.0.6-9".
Created attachment 89574 [details] ascii screenshot of man problems This is what I get with phoebe1 + groff-1.18.1-7 ( the second part is probaly screen running on VT1, I am not sure ). The hyphens in SYNOPSIS are either missing or corrupt.
Looks like the same thing as bug #80847. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 80847 ***
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.