Re: [Groff] bullets render as question marks

[Aaron Davies]

> On Nov 30, 2015, at 12:52 PM, Ingo Schwarze <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> Hi Aaron,
> 
> Aaron Davies wrote on Mon, Nov 30, 2015 at 12:38:13PM -0500:
> 
>> \(bu bullets in man pages are rendering as question marks under
>> default settings for me
>> 
>> is this expected?
> 
> No, but you don't supply enough information to really help debugging.
> 
> * Which version of which operating system are you running?

the commands are running on RHEL 6.7 (also tested on 5.11, same behavior 
there); the terminal apps i've tried this through are X.Org 6.8.99.903(253) 
xterm on RHEL 6.7, XTerm(215) on RHEL 5.11, PuTTY 0.63 on windows 7, and 
Terminal and iTerm 2.1.4 on OS X 10.10.5

> * Which version of groff are you running?

on RHEL 6.7, 1.18.1.4; on RHEL 5.11, 1.18.1.1

> * Which version of man(1) are you running?

on RHEL 6.7, 1.6f; on RHEL 5.11, 1.6d

> Please show the output of the following commands:
> 
> $ locale
> $ env | grep -i term
> $ echo '\(bu' | nroff | hexdump -C
> $ echo '\(bu' | mandoc | hexdump -C

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="C"
LC_NUMERIC="C"
LC_TIME="C"
LC_COLLATE="C"
LC_MONETARY="C"
LC_MESSAGES="C"
LC_PAPER="C"
LC_NAME="C"
LC_ADDRESS="C"
LC_TELEPHONE="C"
LC_MEASUREMENT="C"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="C"
LC_ALL=C
$ env - locale
LANG=
LC_CTYPE="POSIX"
LC_NUMERIC="POSIX"
LC_TIME="POSIX"
LC_COLLATE="POSIX"
LC_MONETARY="POSIX"
LC_MESSAGES="POSIX"
LC_PAPER="POSIX"
LC_NAME="POSIX"
LC_ADDRESS="POSIX"
LC_TELEPHONE="POSIX"
LC_MEASUREMENT="POSIX"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="POSIX"
LC_ALL=
$ env | grep -i term
TERM=vt100
$ env - env | grep -i term
$ echo '\(bu' | nroff | hexdump -C
00000000  3f 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a  0a 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a  |?...............|
00000010  0a 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a  0a 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a 0a  |................|
*
00000040  0a 0a 0a                                          |...|
00000043
$ echo '\(bu' | mandoc | hexdump -C
-ksh: mandoc: not found
$ 

(identical output on RHEL 6.7 and RHEL 5.11)

> The latter may help diagnosing the problem if you have mandoc(1)
> installed.
> 
> More information may be needed, but the above should get us started.
> 
> I suspect that you have set your locale(1) to an encoding your
> terminal doesn't support, for example a UTF-8 locale in a non-UTF-8
> terminal, but that's a far shot given that you provided so little
> information.
> 
>> $ grep ^TROFF /etc/man.config
>> TROFF/usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc
> 
> That's probably not relevant.  The output shown below indicates
> that your man(1) is not using the -Tps output mode.

sorry, wrong variable; i think i meant to show NROFF

on RHEL 6.7:

$ grep ^NROFF /etc/man.config
NROFF           /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc 2>/dev/null
$ 

on RHEL 5.11:

$ grep ^NROFF /etc/man.config
NROFF           /usr/bin/nroff -c --legacy NROFF_OLD_CHARSET -mandoc 2>/dev/null
$ 
-- 
Aaron Davies
address@hidden