UTF-8 problem in 8.0

[Sean C. Farley]

On Sun, 3 Jan 2010, Ulrich Spörlein wrote:

> On Fri, 01.01.2010 at 15:47:36 -0800, Derek Kulinski wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> After installing FreeBSD 8.0 I noticed that some characters aren't 
>> displayed correctly (it worked fine for 7.2).
>>
>> Mainly the dash character is most noticeable (though it's possible 
>> it's more of them).
>>
>> Example:
>> env LANG=C man sh
>> env LANG=pl_PL.UTF-8 man sh
>> env LANG=en_US.UTF-8 man sh
>>
>> The first command shows everything fine, the later two seem to show 
>> some unprintable character in place of every dash (i.e. in the second 
>> paragraph word "built-in", or the dashes that break up the words at 
>> the end of the line)
>
> me too, though I'm only setting LC_CTYPE to de_DE.UTF-8 and I don't 
> always see it. It must be some combination of xterm/ssh and/or putty 
> that breaks this.
>
> On the other hand, I thought there was a commit done, that would 
> render - (the dash) always as - (0x2d) so you can copy&paste the 
> examples from the manpage into your shell.
>
> But perhaps I was just dreaming this up?

The last commit that I recall (r192561) fixed dashes in front of options 
(.Fl macro) but not dashes present within a man page.  Personally, I 
just create an alias for man to call 'LANG=C man' to protect against 
examples with non-ASCII (U+002D) dashes.

Read the commit message[1] for a better explanation of unresolved 
issues.

Sean
   1. http://svn.freebsd.org/viewvc/base?view=revision&revision=192561
-- 
scf at FreeBSD.org