I hate to say this, but at least on my system, this problem has something to do with KDE, not with perldoc. KDE appears to have been misconfigured by Redhat so that it displays a number of escaped characters, in particular "-", as box-thingies (I do believe that is the technical term).

Try this experiment: do ctrl-alt-whatever and pull up a console. Check there. Now start gnome-terminal and check its output. On my system, the problem only exists in Konsole (and in xterm if you don't start it with the -u8 parameter).

And more specifically, the problem occurs with anything man-formatted in Konsole. Unfortunately, I'm not where to go from here except to check the Konsole docs to see if there's a UTF-8 setting that will fix it. I'll get back to you before the bitterness that is the whole KDE-under-Redhat debate bears its ugly fruit.

Surprised to read that your man pages are fine.

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Allolex