This puzzled me from a few years. After trying every thing like in that thread, http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-670013-postdays-0-postorder-asc-start-0.html I finaly get the correct accentuated characters by using groff-utf8 from http://www.haible.de/bruno/packages-groff-utf8.html and by replacing in /etc/man.conf NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc -c by NROFF /usr/bin/groff-utf8 -Tutf8 -mandoc So, this is definitly an issue with nroff and accentuated characters. This append only when using non English locales like es_VE.utf8 and fr_CH.utf8. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. man mplayer 2. 3. Actual Results: The accentuated charachters are garbage Expected Results: The accentuated characters should be the correct ones.
Note that the -c option doesn't work with groff-utf8. In consequence, my custon less color sheme is ignored, but at least I get the correct characters. It was the same issue without the custom color scheme,
(In reply to Dominique Michel from comment #1) > Note that the -c option doesn't work with groff-utf8. In consequence, my > custon less color sheme is ignored, but at least I get the correct > characters. It was the same issue without the custom color scheme, Probaly the most comedian argument ever read here is the mark "Status: UNCONFIRMED "... Thanks for this link, I lost ist a year ago...
easier solution: switch to man-db which takes care of doing charset conversion on the fly for you *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 93664 ***
