[25481] in Athena Bugs
Re: linux 9.2.27: iso_8859-1(7) manual page
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Thu Feb 5 00:40:43 2004
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@mit.edu>
To: Keith Winstein <keithw@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <200402042334.i14NY5cr030678@m56-129-30.mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2004 00:40:34 -0500
cc: bugs@mit.edu
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On Wed, 2004-02-04 at 18:34, Keith Winstein wrote:
> As viewed by the "man iso_8859-1" command, the manual page terminates
> prematurely, after the text "The following table displays the characters
> in ISO 8859 Latin-1, which are printable and unlisted in the ascii(7)
> manual page." The table is missing.
I believe this part of the bug report is the problem described in
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=103214
and may possibly be fixed by itself in 9.3. The behavior is somewhat
different, in that "man rand" produces only an error message while "man
iso_8859-1" produces most of a man page. I don't know why that is.
If you fire up gnome-terminal with LANG set to en_US.UTF-8, the charset
situation improves somewhat but does not become perfect. Parts of
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-demo.txt display
correctly, but parts display as blank. (xterm displays more of the demo
file correctly, but not all of it; mozilla appears to have all of the
relevant code pages, but parts of the file look bad because of the
proportional-width font.) Getting back to your bug report, "man
iso_8859-1" spews a bunch of warnings and displays some, but not all, of
the characters in the table, suggesting that either something is
deficient in groff, or that the man page won't work right because it's
not encoded in UTF-8.
Anyway, Athena is unlikely to make changes to the OS behavior in this
area, except perhaps by changing the default locale setting in the
standard dotfiles. I'm still not sure what the right answer is there.
