aterm/rxvt man page issues

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 12:10:41AM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> I use aterm rather than xterm (or konsole or rxvt or ...) because it
> supports pseudo-transparency and is light-weight.  I have one minor
> but nagging problem with it.
> 
> When I use "man" (actually a special mode of "less" on most Linux
> systems), it does weird things when displaying "`", "'", and "-"
> (back-tick, single quote, and hyphen).  I get the letter "a" with a
> caret over it replacing any of them, and some extra spaces.  This can
> be a real pain, as it makes the man pages hard to read and throws off
> searches: the search target is still found, but isn't necessarily
> displayed in the part of the man page you're seeing - so you have to
> search for your search.
> 
> I've tried several things, such as the LESSCHARSET environment
> variable (interesting effects, no solution) and "man -7 <progname>"
> (no effect?).  Since less itself has no issue with `, ', or -, I have
> to assume that the problem is introduced by the ?roff processing that
> takes place before the page is displayed.  But I haven't the slightest
> idea how to fix this.
> 
> Has anybody encountered this?  Any solutions?  Even if you don't have
> an answer, verification of the problem on other distros/OSes would be
> appreciated.  I'm running Ubuntu Breezy, but I seem to recall having a
> very similar problem under a Debian and possibly even RedHat, and I
> just verified equally bad behaviour under FC5.  rxvt (from which aterm
> was forked/spawned) has very similar issues.

I know some characters MUST be escaped in man pages.  Some
viewers/processors seem to ignore the errors if the man page code
doesn't make sense, while others just screw up.  The characters you
mention certainly are among the ones I recall should be escaped.  Most
likely you are just seeing problems with badly written man pages.  I
have seen a number of man pages fixed with patches in debian packages
due to the same kind of screwup.

For example:

.\" DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE!  It was generated by help2man 1.33.
.TH LS "1" "July 2004" "ls (coreutils) 5.2.1" "User Commands"
.SH NAME
ls \- list directory contents
.SH SYNOPSIS
etc...

Note how the - has to be escaped with a \?  If it isn't some man page
processors will get confused since the see a - without the proper
options around it.  Maybe that turns into the odd characters on some
systems.  The man page syntax seems odd, but I have never actually tried
to figure it out either.

Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml