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in reply to Perldoc Problem: Linux or Perl?

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.

--
Allolex

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Re: Re: Perldoc Problem: Linux or Perl?
by jasonk (Parson) on Mar 16, 2003 at 23:56 UTC

    It has nothing to do with KDE vs. GNOME, it's a bug in less-378-7/groff-1.18.1-20, if you upgrade to the latest version of those two packages from rawhide, the problem will go away.


    We're not surrounded, we're in a target-rich environment!

      Thanks for the advice, and the problem did go away. That still leaves the question open as to why perldoc and man ouput was formatted correctly under gnome-terminal and xterm, and not under konsole (and putty over ssh, apparently). It still looks a lot like Redhat had a workaround for Gnome and not for KDE, since it worked correctly in those environments before updating.

      Update: added text in italics above.

      --
      Allolex

        That must have something to do with your environment, as it was not formatted correctly for me using gnome-terminal or xterm until I tracked that bug down. Not being a KDE user, I can't comment on how konsole and gnome-terminal differ.


        We're not surrounded, we're in a target-rich environment!
Re: Re: Perldoc Problem: Linux or Perl?
by blm (Hermit) on Mar 17, 2003 at 03:41 UTC

    I don't think that the problem is restricted to Kconsole as I get the "...displays a number of escaped characters, in particular "-", as box-thingies..." when I use putty to ssh into a freshly installed Redhat 8 box.


    Ben Marsh