Re: [Groff] man file character encoding.

[Erwin Waterlander]

Colin Watson schreef, Op 26-9-2013 10:32:
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 06:50:38AM +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > Hello Erwin!
> > > How can this be fixed?
> > Assuming that the problem is caused by `-p', a possible solution is to
> > not use this man option or environment variable and add option `-t' to
> > nroff in `/etc/man.conf'.
> Or use man-db instead, which is much smarter about character encodings
> and handles your situation out of the box with no configuration
> required; I just tested it to confirm this.
>
> With all due respect to Federico (we're co-workers these days, as chance
> would have it!), I'm afraid that the other man package simply doesn't
> have enough encoding support to do this right in general, and most major
> GNU/Linux distributions have switched away from it at this point because
> of this.

Hi,

I was not aware that man-db existed. I have tried man-db now on Fedora 
Linux 19. I changed the encoding of a man page from UTF-8 to Latin-1 and 
it still displayed correctly. Thanks for the information.

I'm curious to know how man-db determines the encoding of the man page. 
I cannot find that information. Would you like to explain how man-db 
does the encoding detecion?

The reason I work with Federico's man is that I often work on Cygwin 
when I don't have Linux at hand. Cygwin does not have man-db available. 
Soon I get a Russian translation of my program (dos2unix), that made 
this problem actual again for me. Three years ago I saw this problem 
coming. At that time I tested also on Fedora 12, which was still using 
Federico's man. I didn't notice that Fedora changed to man-db in the 
meantime.


best regards,

--
Erwin Waterlander
http://waterlan.home.xs4all.nl/