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0 pointsenriquto4y ago0 comments

Yes, the output of help2man is not perfect. My main gripe is that it imposes a rather strict format for the manpage, and not all manpage markup is available. But it is better than not having a manpage at all.

The problem with non-ascii characters can be solved, though. Just add an option like "-L en_US.UTF-8" to the help2man call.

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da39a3ee4y ago

Thanks. However, now help2man is outputting the unicode character correctly, but `man $help2manOutput` is displaying things like `a(R)` and `a` instead of the unicode character. I've also tried with the `LOCALE=en_US.UTF-8` env var set.

enriqutoOP4y ago

This sounds like a problem with your pager, that is used to scroll the output of man pages in the terminal. Do accents appear correctly on other manpages in your system? If I recall correctly, on macos catalina I had to set my locale variable LC_CTYPE (and not LOCALE) so that the less pager recognized the accents.

da39a3ee4y ago

I don't think it's a pager problem for the following reasons:

- If I do `man help2manOutput | cat` then it does not page, but I still see `a` and `a(R)` in place of the desired unicode characters

- `less help2manOutput` renders them correctly

- In general I have no problem viewing unicode characters in less: I'm familiar with env vars such as LESS and PAGER.

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0 pointsenriquto4y ago0 comments

The problem with non-ascii characters can be solved, though. Just add an option like "-L en_US.UTF-8" to the help2man call.

0 comments

da39a3ee4y ago

enriqutoOP4y ago

da39a3ee4y ago

I don't think it's a pager problem for the following reasons:

- If I do `man help2manOutput | cat` then it does not page, but I still see `a` and `a(R)` in place of the desired unicode characters

- `less help2manOutput` renders them correctly

- In general I have no problem viewing unicode characters in less: I'm familiar with env vars such as LESS and PAGER.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse