Re: multilingual man pages

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@xxxxxxx>]

Pablo Saratxaga <pablo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Kaixo!
>
> [about utf-8 man pages I suppose]
>
>> >> What has to be done with less? If LESSCHARSET=utf-8, it should handle
>> >> utf-8 correct already.
>
> The problem is not less, less works very well with utf-8 (at least latest
> versions/patched versions of less do).
>
> The problem is the program that formats the man pages: groff.
>
> groff currently works correctl *only* with iso-8859-1 text files (it can
> also use a few typographic chars outside of iso-8859-1, but it cannot
> properly display a page in Polish, cyrillic, or any language that cannot
> be written with iso-8859-1 only).
>
>>> I have problems with bold Unicode characters (the famous
>>> "XY Backspace XY" hack).
>> 
>> This should be OK in SuSE Linux >= 7.3, I applied a small patch to
>> less to fix this.
>
> create a very simple man page in utf-8 with some chars like the euro,
> a polish barred l, a ccedilla, a couple of greek and cyrillic chars,...
> then try to call "man" to display that man page.

Yes, I think this still doesn't work. At least I was not successful
yet when trying to display Japanese man-pages in an UTF-8 xterm. 

What I fixed in less were only problems with boldface and underlined
iso-8859-1 characters in man-pages when these man-pages were displayed
in an UTF-8 xterm, i.e. when these characters were output as
UTF-8. less didn't handle the groff-way of bold-facing and underlining
correctly in that case, German special characters like öüäß displayed
as mojibake in an UTF-8 xterm when they were in bold or underlined,
although they were fine without bold or underline. This is what
works now in SuSE Linux 7.3. 

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@xxxxxxx>   http://www.suse.de/~mfabian
睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/