Several man pages -- the only one I wrote down is bash -- are truncated at a line ending with colon. I.e. $ man bash ... COMMAND EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT The shell has an execution environment, which consists of the follow- ing: $ // ^%@#!! The problem goes away if you change -Tlatin1 to -Tascii in /etc/man.conf. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. see above 2. 3. Actual Results: See above Expected Results: "man bash" should produce 4512 lines ending with GNU Bash-2.05b 2002 July 15 BASH(1) Happens with two different x86 installations starting with stage1-x86-20030910.tar.bz2. One athlon-xp aggressive opts, one pentium2 conservative opts.
I've had the same problem: With the default `man.conf', some man pages are truncated when piped through `col -b`. My problem seems to be that `col -b` truncates its output at any charcter with its high bit set, and the default `man.conf' allows the output of such characters. (I use `vim -R -' as my manpager, and the input to vim has to be stripped of backspaces.) With the default `man.conf', look at the output of `/usr/bin/man -P less bash`. In the section `COMMAND EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT', there is a bulleted list. The bullets are displayed as `<B7>' in reverse video. This is the character `\0xB7', and less displays characters this way when the high bit is set. If you pipe the `man` output through `col -b`, the output is truncated at this point. Try `/usr/bin/man -P "col -b | less" bash`, you'll see the truncated output. Other characters and charater sequences found in the man files are also translated into characters with the high bit set. For example in `/usr/share/man/man1/sendmail.1.gz' supplied by the `postfix' ebuild, in the description of the option `-i', the word "don't" is found in the file as "don\'t". This two-byte sequence, "\'", is translated to `0xB4'. `col -b` truncates the manpage at this point. As suggested by the comments in `man.conf', I removed the option `-Tlatin1' from the definition of NROFF. Now all is well. Instead of getting `0xB4' for the bullets in the bash manpage, I get the letter `o'. The apostrophe appears correctly in the sendmail manpage, and `col -b' doesn't truncate its output.
i too am seeing the <B7> junk ... but when i remove the '-Tlatin1' from my man.conf, it still shows up :( root@vapier 0 ~ # grep ^NROFF /etc/man.conf NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc
ok, man-1.5o_p2 fixes the <B7> crap ... turns out i couldnt get it to work on my box because my man was reading the cached version :) thanks guys for the heavy research !
All comments in here seem to prove that just removing the "-Tlatin1" solves the original problem. Why on earth then it was replaced with -Tascii as that breaks viewing of man-pages on utf8-systems. For example it criples german umlaut (
All comments in here seem to prove that just removing the "-Tlatin1" solves the original problem. Why on earth then it was replaced with -Tascii as that breaks viewing of man-pages on utf8-systems. For example it criples german umlaut (äöü and ß). I suggest removing -T... completely and let /usr/bin/nroff use its autodetection.
col -p works w/out -Tascii ?
considering neither groff nor man supports UTF8 properly, this will be handled properly in due time both upstream projects are aware of the issues and working on them
