On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 12:09:04AM +0200, Bas Zoetekouw wrote:
> Package: man-db
> Version: 2.4.3-1
> Severity: normal
>
> It looks like man outputs only ASCII7 text if the output is redirected
> to a file or a pipe. This even happens if the locale is explicitly
> specified on the command line.
>
> For example, set your locale to de_DE.UTF-8, and compare the outputs
> of "man chsh", "man chsh|less" and "man -L de_DE.UTF-8|less". The
> first one outputs nice utf8 German umlaut chars, but these chars are
> simply dropped in the latter two cases.
>
> This breaks programs such as pinfo, which uses man as a backend for
> displaying man pages.
>
> I would suggest that man just looks at the current locale (or adding a
> command line param that forces such behaviour). Anyone who
> wants a clean ASCII7 text can simply set the correct locale, or
> specify -7 on the command line.
Actually, all locale support is still present. The problem is that man
pages being output to a file or a pipe are now filtered through 'col
-b', the intent of which was simply:
o When stdout is not a terminal, man pages will be formatted in
plain text without the use of backspace or ANSI formatting
characters.
Unfortunately, and unintentionally, this clobbers characters that aren't
printable ASCII. Bah. 'col -b -p -x' is much better, but exhibits some
minor corruption ("ÜBERSICHT" at the start of a line has some garbage
before it, probably because col can't handle the overstruck "Ü").
Changing the arguments to col seems to be obviously the right thing to
do, but beyond that I'm not sure what to do about this. I could reassign
to bsdmainutils in the hope that col can be changed to deal with UTF-8
in UTF-8 locales, or I could just disable the col command in the
pipeline for multibyte locales. The latter would be a shame given that
it means everyone has to go back to putting explicit 'col -b' in
makefiles and things again, and the breakage pending a col fix is
confined to just a few places ...
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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