Font problem with man page viewing

Hello, I was wondering what would cause this:

Every time I want to view a man page of some command, the "-" are replaced with an "a" with a caret on top. This makes the man page hard to read. I am running RHL 8, has anyone else had this problem?

Ex:

NAME
httpd â Apache hypertext transfer protocol server

SYNOPSIS
httpd [ âd serverroot ] [ âf config ] [ âC directive ] [ âc directive ]
[ âD parameter ]

httpd [ âh ] [ âl ] [ âL ] [ âv ] [ âV ] [ ât ] [ âX ]

yes. the exact same thing - an "a" with a caret, but i'm afraid i've made zero effort to sort it out. (other than the rudimentary find and replace between my eyes and my brain). it can't be that hard - character sets, config of the man program, config of PuTTY...?

so, seeing as Rdesign has brought it up, i hereby register my interest in the emergence of a solution...

That's right. I should also mention that I'm using PuTTY for SSH. Don't want to forget to add the details...

ghatzhat's post gave me an idea. I didn't think of messing with PuTTY before, I thought the problem was with the operating system...

Ok, to fix the "a" with a hat problem in PuTTY:

1. Open PuTTY and load your profile (must load the profile for this to work)

2. On the left hand window expand "Window" and select "Translation".

3. you should see a drop down menu: "Recived data assumed to be in which character set". Drop that down and select: "UTF-8".
Also, change the "Handling of line drawing characters" radio button set to: "Font has XWindows encoding".

4. Back to the left hand window, select "Session" at the very top. That will take you back to your login (I only mention this because I lost it once) and click the save button.

If you follow these steps please post and tell me if they work for you or not.

beautiful, mate - i could have managed that.

but i didn't.

thanks.

ah... that said, i'm seeing some 'white boxes' for some (not all) of my hyphens now. i'm wondering if you're getting it too, Rdesign? by white boxes, i mean those rectangles you get when there's an unrecognised character.

Yep, I see them too. I can live with that for the time being though. It's all those caret-a's that drove me nuts. If you figure that one out please share, it would be nice to see my man pages the way they were supposed to be seen.

I personally like to read my man pages formatted on paper.

If you've got a printer set up on your linux box, I believe you can print out man pages nicely formatted with


man -t command


you may have to do


man -t command | lpr


If that doesn't work, which it doesn't under BSD, I hunt down the actual man page file and run it through groff ...


gzcat /usr/share/man/man1/vi.1.gz | groff -Tps -mandoc | lpr

I don't have a printer for my Box. I've thought about it, even read some about how *x systems treat printers. I would like to do it but it seems like I need to do even more reading to make it work properly. What kind of printers would Red Hat Linux (v8) support? What material would you advise someone to read to get started?

Good Idea, thanks.

www.cups.org should get you started. The version and thus supported printers varies by the dist.

Thanks, I wouldn't have found that.