aterm/rxvt man page issues

[Joseph Kubik]

On Thursday 01 June 2006 00:10, 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.

Using the following, I do see (back-tick, single quote, and hyphen) correctly.
rxvt -ls -fn 8x12 -bg black -fg white -title &

However the line wraps of long man page lines is handled badly and I see 
umlaut a instead of a clean line wrap.

I've seen the problem you describe on some systems. I've never found a 
solution.

-Joseph-
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