Re: "Copyright \251" on man pages

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 19 Jun 2001, Dan Jacobson wrote:

> Eli> You should set up Groff to use -Tascii
> 
> Hmm... how would a user reset this despite his GNU/Linux distribution?
> export GROFF_TYPESETTER=ascii
> doesn't seem to help $ man or M-x man...

It does for me.  Perhaps some of your man pages are already formatted,
in which case Groff options won't affect them.  You need to reformat
any pages you have in the cat[1-9lno] subdirectories of all the
man-page directories on your system where the Copyright sign is
encoded in Latin-1.

> [Of course Chinese man pages couldn't use this]

Chinese man pages shouldn't include the Copyright sign.

> Eli>      C-x RET c latin-1 RET M-x man basename RET
> 
> looks nice... Hmm... would that go in a hook then?

You could customize process-coding-system-alist, so that when `man' is
run by Emacs, the coding systems are set accordingly.

> Anyways supposing I don't want to bother with the GNU/Linux
> distributor guys, what env variable would one set to get (C) instead
> of non ASCII before the man page makes it into emacs? ... but without
> hurting Chinese man pages?

I have no idea how to work with Chinese man pages without hurting the
non-Chinese ones with non-ASCII characters, sorry.  Other than
formatting them all manually with the right options for each page,
that is.

> Eli> The next Emacs release automatically uses the locale-specific
> Eli> coding system to decode man pages (in case you have man pages
> Eli> translated into Chinese, for example).
> 
> I can see the body of a Chinese man page OK with M-x man, but for each
> header line, the "overstriking ^H's meant to move the printer head back
> for another hit, thus making bold characters" interfere...

This is fixed in the next Emacs release (the problem is that the original
code in M-x man assumed that each character takes only one column,
which isn't true for Chinese characters).