Re: multilingual man pages

[Markus Kuhn <mgk25@xxxxxxxxx>]

> David Starner writes:
>
>> What has to be done with less? If LESSCHARSET=utf-8, it should handle
>> utf-8 correct already.

LESSCHARSET is long obsolete and should not be used. Less-358 tests
LANG/LC_CTYPE/LC_ALL for the UTF-8 substring and activates its UTF-8 mode
accordingly. Should be changed to nl_langinfo(CODESET) eventually. Robert
Brady posted here ages ago a patch to fix a less-358 bug with
bold/underlined non-ASCII characters in UTF-8 mode, which I understand
both SuSE 7.3 and Red Hat <whatever> have applied in their latest
versions. Less has not been updated in over a year ...

It's all in the FAQ:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#apps

On Red Hat 7.1, you had to change a line in /etc/man.config to

  NROFF           /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc

in order to get man pages working in UTF-8 locales. SuSE
7.2 used the mandb package that caches preformatted man pages in a
locale-independent way and thus man couldn't be used there in a mixed
Latin-1/UTF-8 environment.

Groff works fine now in UTF-8 locales and can produce the entire
PostScript standard repertoire in UTF-8 plaintext. Try man groff_char for
a good demo.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/