aterm/rxvt man page issues

[William O'Higgins Witteman]

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

You are not alone in this.  I have encountered this problem with about a
dozen terminal emulators (all on Debian testing).  The beginning of the
problem for me was using Unicode in my terminals.  That's when I found
the wonky quote characters in man pages.  I was initially using Eterm,
but if it has Unicode support I couldn't find it.  I switched to
rxvt-unicode and I eventually had to scrap that because of the problem
you mention.

I think it may be a font codepoint issue, because I have never seen the
problem when using an X-based remote terminal on Windoze.  (First with
Cygwin and now with FreeNX).  You could try changing your fonts and
seeing what you see.  Below are the terminals I remember testing and the
reasons I gave up on them:

Eterm           - no Unicode support
rxvt-unicode    - same error you saw
xterm           - no transparency, resource intensive
terminal.app    - too many dependancies
aterm           - same error you saw
mlterm          - slow, no transparency
gnome-terminal  - slow
konsole         - slow
wterm           - same error you saw
xvt             - same error you saw
xfce4-terminal  - works, is my current terminal

I hope that helps.
-- 

yours,

William

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