aterm/rxvt man page issues

[Giles Orr]

Thanks for all the responses, which inspired me to struggle on.  And
an answer seems to have been found.  I thought "what if I trace the
pipeline that man pages go through before they're displayed?  I could
find the error."  I didn't manage to get a definitive answer, but this
worked:

  gunzip -c /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz | groff -man -T ascii | less

Well, mostly ...  Tables don't get formatted.  Easily remedied, as it turns out:

  gunzip -c /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz | tbl | groff -mandoc -T ascii | less

And voila, the man pages display correctly in aterm!  But to use this
myself I'd have to write a script to search the $MANPATH and a bunch
of other stuff, so the search continued.  I also still don't know
where the breakage was because this can't be the same pipeline man
uses or things wouldn't be broken in aterm.

Anyway, several more hours of reading and the simple solution was
found.  Put this in your /etc/bashrc or whereever:

  MANOPT=-Eascii

*sigh*

A quick check seems to indicate this doesn't cause problems on the
console or in xterm.  I wouldn't expect it to, but thought I should
check.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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