Encoding in nroff and man

[Yevgeniy Makarov]

Hello,

I am using FC7, and I discovered an apparent inconsistency in handling
encodings by nroff and man. If there is another place where I should
address this question, I would appreciate if you let me know.

I noticed the issue of encoding in man because I am using Midnight
Commander which is apparently only able to use 8-bit encodings for
output. As a result, I had some garbage where single quotation marks
should have been when I viewed man pages in MC (using M-! key). The
reason was that these single quotation marks were Unicode characters
taking more than one byte.

Looking at /etc/man.config, I saw that man uses

/usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc 2>/dev/null

command to process man files. Since the man page for nroff says that
it accepts the option -T<encoding>, I thought I would add the option
"-Tlatin1", but it did not make any difference. Looking inside nroff,
which is a shell script, it seems that it ignores the -T option:

case $1 in
    ...
    -[eq] | -s* | -u* | -T* )
      # ignore these options
      ;;

Further, there seems to be only one place where the nroff script
determines the value of charset_out variable, and that is from the
"locale charmap" command, even though nroff man page says that it also
tries  LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE,  LANG, and LESSCHARSET environment variables.

When I replaced the nroff command with groff, the -Tlatin1 option
worked and I was able to obtain the man page in latin1 encoding.

Of course, I can set LC_ALL to en_US.iso88591, but I may want to have
Unicode in Xterm when I am not running MC, and, secondly, this does
not eliminate the mismatch between the nroff man page and the actual
behavior of nroff.

I would appreciate any thoughts on this.

Evgeny

[Karl Larsen]

Yevgeniy Makarov wrote:
>  Hello,
>  
>  I am using FC7, and I discovered an apparent inconsistency in handling
>  encodings by nroff and man. If there is another place where I should
>  address this question, I would appreciate if you let me know.
>  
>  I noticed the issue of encoding in man because I am using Midnight
>  Commander which is apparently only able to use 8-bit encodings for
>  output. As a result, I had some garbage where single quotation marks
>  should have been when I viewed man pages in MC (using M-! key). The
>  reason was that these single quotation marks were Unicode characters
>  taking more than one byte.
>  
>  Looking at /etc/man.config, I saw that man uses
>  
>  /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc 2>/dev/null
>  
>  command to process man files. Since the man page for nroff says that
>  it accepts the option -T<encoding>, I thought I would add the option
>  "-Tlatin1", but it did not make any difference. Looking inside nroff,
>  which is a shell script, it seems that it ignores the -T option:
>  
>  case $1 in
>      ...
>      -[eq] | -s* | -u* | -T* )
>        # ignore these options
>        ;;
>  
>  Further, there seems to be only one place where the nroff script
>  determines the value of charset_out variable, and that is from the
>  "locale charmap" command, even though nroff man page says that it also
>  tries  LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE,  LANG, and LESSCHARSET environment variables.
>  
>  When I replaced the nroff command with groff, the -Tlatin1 option
>  worked and I was able to obtain the man page in latin1 encoding.
>  
>  Of course, I can set LC_ALL to en_US.iso88591, but I may want to have
>  Unicode in Xterm when I am not running MC, and, secondly, this does
>  not eliminate the mismatch between the nroff man page and the actual
>  behavior of nroff.
>  
>  I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
>  
>  Evgeny
>   
	It sounds to me the title is wrong. I read man and info in a terminal. 
Using Midnight Commander is not my way. In anycase the title should be 
that MC can't display man pages.

	You have done a lot of work getting MC to work.


-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.

[Yevgeniy Makarov]

>          It sounds to me the title is wrong. I read man and info in a
> terminal.
>  Using Midnight Commander is not my way. In anycase the title should be
>  that MC can't display man pages. 
Well, how about the title "nroff does not use -T option contrary to
what the man page says"?

Evgeny

[Aaron Konstam]

On Sat, 2007-08-04 at 20:45 +0200, Yevgeniy Makarov wrote:
>  
>  >         It sounds to me the title is wrong. I read man and info in a
>  terminal.
>  > Using Midnight Commander is not my way. In anycase the title should
>  be
>  > that MC can't display man pages.
>  
>  Well, how about the title "nroff does not use -T option contrary to
>  what the man page says"?
>  
>  Evgeny  
Could you tell us again why this is so important to you that nroff uses
-T?
--
=======================================================================
Television is a medium because anything well done is rare. -- attributed
to both Fred Allen and Ernie Kovacs
=======================================================================
Aaron Konstam telephone: [phone] e-mail: akonstam(a)sbcglobal.net

[Yevgeniy Makarov]

As for myself, I solved the problem of viewing man pages in MC. I just
think it is a bug when a program's behavior does not agree with the
documentation. Either one or the other has to change. If you'd like,
you could point me to people who can do it. If this is too trivial a
thing, so be it.

Thanks,
Evgeny

[Kam Leo]

On 8/4/07, Yevgeniy Makarov <emakarov(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  As for myself, I solved the problem of viewing man pages in MC. I
> just
>  think it is a bug when a program's behavior does not agree with the
>  documentation. Either one or the other has to change. If you'd like,
>  you could point me to people who can do it. If this is too trivial a
>  thing, so be it.
>
>  Thanks,
>  Evgeny 
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/