Re: "Copyright \251" on man pages

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 14 Jun 2001, Dan Jacobson wrote:

> >>>>> "Eli" == Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> Eli> On 11 Jun 2001, Dan Jacobson wrote:
> 
> >> But I in emacs using M-x man, I see
> >> Copyright \251 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> 
> Eli> What man page is that?  I tried several, but didn't see this.
> $ bzgrep '\\(co' /usr/share/man/man1/*  #look, I'm smarter than Eli :-)

What, you mean I can log into your system and run bzgrep??  What login
name? what password? or should I dust off my password-cracking
toolchain?

(I did run Grep, but it didn't find anything on my system.  You
shouldn't assume that what you see on yours is present on others, and
that people who cannot reproduce your problems are merely stupid or
incompetent.)

> e.g., man basename.

"man basename" doesn't show the 8-bit copyright character for me.
What version of Groff do you have installed?  Does it perhaps default
to -Tlatin1 instead of -Tascii?  Try this:

   groff -man -Tascii basename.1 | less

Do you see the `\\(co' character is displayed with its proper ASCII
emulation?  That's why I never see such problems on my machine.

You should set up Groff to use -Tascii, and the problem will go away
(perhaps after reformatting all the formatted pages you already have
in your `cat?' directories.)

> Funny, "Copyright © 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc."
> shows the copyright character in gnus, but not in M-x man.

How do you mean ``in gnus''?  How do you display man pages in Gnus?

> However,
> in gnus the mode line is "=" and in Man mode it is "B" for me.
> Coding system for saving this buffer:
>   = -- emacs-mule
> Default coding system (for new files):
>   B -- chinese-big5-unix

Does the following work in Emacs for you?

     C-x RET c latin-1 RET M-x man basename RET

The next Emacs release automatically uses the locale-specific
coding system to decode man pages (in case you have man pages
translated into Chinese, for example).  But I don't think it will help
to display the Latin-1 Copyright character correctly in your case.

I think formatted man pages should never include that character except
in Latin-n locales.  Consider filing a bug report with the
distributors of your GNU/Linux system.