Re: Documentation - I see squares
John Foster <johnf@mars.nettrek.net.au> writes:
>>> In a lot of man pages, and some of the documentation in /usr/doc
>>> there are there little squares or cryptic <$%^> thingees. I guess
>>> that there's something I've missed somewhere...
>>>
>>> What have/haven't I done?
>>
>> On the assumption that you ran into some highlighting or underlining
>> markup, then you might try running your documents through a smart
>> pager that's able to do something reasonable with such things.
>> Try this:
>> export MANPAGER=/usr/bin/less
[snip]
>
> I don't think that's the problem, less is my PAGER, and I know about zcat.
> Most of the text is quite readable. The little squares are often where I'd
> expect an apostrophe to be, and some of the funny codes are <B7> for
> example. It looks like a bit of hex.
You're reading an ISO-8859-1 (8-bit) document with `less' in it's 7-bit
mode.
You can do one of two things --
1. $ export LC_CTYPE=iso_8859_1
$ less <filename>
2. $ less -r <filename>
The first is the preferred solution, but requires you to have set up all
the locale data correctly.
The second just punts the 8-bit char to your display.
In either case, your display has to support 8-bit characters, and show
them meaningfully. `xterm' can handle it. I haven't checked the
console (I'm sitting on a Solaris box right now)
- Hari
--
Raja R Harinath ------------------------------ harinath@cs.umn.edu
"When all else fails, read the instructions." -- Cahn's Axiom
"Our policy is, when in doubt, do the right thing." -- Roy L Ash
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