On Sat, 8 Dec 2001, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
Mirsad Todorovac wrote:
Thanks for the thought, Russ - last night I've got some even more confusing information: when I came home to my Linux (:-) box, I was surprized to see that same version (358) of ``less'' displayed 8-bit characters correctly.
Did you check the section `NATIONAL CHARACTER SETS' in the less manpage?
No - frankly I didn't get that far (that's the advantage of ``info'' format documentation that you get menu at the beginning, so you get the basic idea what's inside ...
However, setting LESSCHARSET to ``iso8859'' *did* fix the problem.
Otherwise, my suggestion is (like the GNU project's) not to spend much effort in manpages (the current GPC manpage is rather short and basically just a pointer to the texi documentation), and possibly avoid 8-bit characters if this may cause problems for anyone.
Thanks to Paul Eggert eggert@twinsun.com from comp.sys.sun.admin, solution was found: ``nroff'' stops dumping core with national characters once ``setenv LC_ALL hr_HR'' is done!! Also Paul said in Solaris 8 the nroff coredump problem is fixed.
(However I'm in stupid position that my network management decided not to support transition to Solaris 8, while Sun stopped giving most of support for Solaris 7 - but this is only a remark).
FRANKLY, I don't know how to avoid 8-bit characters in translation (Did you watch the ''Only fools and horses'', the episode where they hired a singer who couldn't speak 'r' but sung only songs without it ;-))))))))
I could replace character that looks like
* * ****
******** ******** * * * * * with plain * * * * * * * ******** ********
but it doesn't look professional, and there is not such a standard as wise Germans introduced writing 'u with umlaut' as 'ue' etc.
That means that it wouldn't be widely accepted, some would even ridicule it I'm affraid, and this is contrary to what we want an to GNU philosophy I guess.
What we *could* do is to say that it's Sun/nroff problem and advise users to either use ``LESSCHARSET=iso8859 groff -Tlatin1 -man | less'' or equivalent, which seems *more GNU*. Or to point them to use ``LC_ALL=hr_HR man gpc.1'', which would call nroff with correct locale ?!?!?
I think Mr. Richard Stallman would agree with me
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