Re: man UTF-8 rendering problem

[Andy Koppe <andy dot koppe at gmail dot com>]

On 13 July 2011 15:07, Nellis, Kenneth wrote:
> I wrote back in January about a UTF-8 rendering error with
> "man size", but got no satisfaction.
>
> http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-01/msg00057.html
>
> I encountered the same issue today with "man addr2line".
>
> Running mintty with the Lucinda Console font and configured
> for the UTF-8 character set and LANG set to C.UTF-8, these
> two man commands render an undefined box symbol where a
> vertical bar would appear. It appears that man is
> attempting to display U+23AA (CURLY BRACKET EXTENSION)
> where it would display "|" (0x7C) were I configured
> for ISO8859-1.
>
> In a separate issue regarding hyphens and dashes, I recall
> that mintty added exception logic to work around an issue
> where Lucinda Console did not support the Unicode HYPHEN
> character as man presented, and so mintty instead rendered
> an Ascii HYPHEN-MINUS (0x2D) instead (or something like that...
> I forget the details).
>
> I wonder in this case whether mintty would be an appropriate
> place for a similar workaround.
>
> Or what would the proper fix be? It seems CURLY BRACKET
> EXTENSION to be an odd choice for this character, but where
> is this choice being made?

Looks like this has been fixed in the man pages for binutils 2.21,
whereas Cygwin still uses 2.20. I noticed that when trying it on an
install with binutils 2.21 from Cygwin Ports, but you can also see
plain old pipe characters being used in 'man
i686-pc-mingw32-addr2line' (assuming you've got the mingw-binutils
package installed, which also uses 2.21).

I don't know exactly what is wrong with those pages, but unlike with
HYPHEN vs HYPHEN-MINUS, the CURLY BRACKET EXTENSION certainly is the
wrong character to be used there, which is why I don't think this
merits a specific workaround in the terminal.

Having said that, mintty issue 264 is about dealing with missing line
drawing glyphs by either rendering them using graphics primitives or
replacing them with approximations, so this one would be a candidate
for that. Low priority though.

The DejaVu Sans Mono actually does have a glyph for the CURLY BRACKET
EXTENSION. Looks rather odd though where those characters are lined up
on top of each other in 'man addr2line', because they're as high as
the character cell thus forming a continuous line, whereas the pipe
character leaves gaps.

Andy

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