bugDatabase-driven manual pager suite - Bugs: bug #26268, man-db is unable to display UTF-8...

 
 

bug #26268: man-db is unable to display UTF-8 chars when using lt_LT.UTF-8 locale

Submitted by:  Andrius Štikonas <stikonas>
Submitted on:  Tue 21 Apr 2009 10:35:48 AM UTC  
 
Category: NoneSeverity: 3 - Normal
Item Group: NoneStatus: Wont Fix
Privacy: PublicAssigned to: None
Open/Closed: Closed

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Wed 22 Apr 2009 03:00:20 PM UTC, comment #1:

I infer that you are using a groff package from Debian, or one based on the Debian patchset to groff.

Real UTF-8 support was not present until groff 1.20. Before that, the best that man-db could do was to recode the manual page to some appropriate legacy locale, run it through groff using a special and rather hacky "ascii8" device added by the Debian patchset, and then recode it back to UTF-8. However, this only works if your page uses only characters representable in the appropriate legacy locale, which is ISO-8859-13 in the case of Lithuanian. This is not the case for your wesnoth(6) manual page:

$ zcat wesnoth.6.gz | iconv -f UTF-8 -t ISO-8859-13 >/dev/null
iconv: illegal input sequence at position 1029

This is actually a bug in your manual page, although I agree that the response to it is rather unhelpful. In your PAVADINIMAS (NAME) section, you use the U+2013 EN DASH character. The NAME section has a special format, and unless you follow it mandb will be unable to understand your page. You need to replace this character with "\-", where the "-" there is the plain ASCII hyphen.

I've tested your page with current man-db and groff 1.20, and it is displayed correctly, although lexgrog still says "parse failed" (even after I added support for the Lithuanian translation of NAME; I've just committed that to Bazaar). After correcting the NAME section, the page is displayed correctly by a Debian unstable system. I'm afraid this is the best that I can can do in man-db given the underlying software involved; I do hope to get Debian up to groff 1.20 in the not-too-distant future.

Your wesnothd(6) page appears to have no problems; it displays correctly for me with no changes.

Colin Watson <cjwatson>
Project Administrator
Tue 21 Apr 2009 10:35:48 AM UTC, original submission:

If lt_LT.UTF-8 manual is located at /some/path/man/lt/man6/ then non ASCII UTF-8 characters are displayed incorrectly.

This does not happen with other languages or when manuals are copied to another path. Attached man pages are encoded in UTF-8

Reproducing:
Copy attached file to /usr/share/man/lt/man6/
Execute:
man -L lt_LT.UTF-8 wesnoth

Andrius Štikonas <stikonas>

 

(Note: upload size limit is set to 16384 kB, after insertion of the required escape characters.)

Attach File(s):
   
   
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Attached Files
file #17983:  wesnoth.6.gz added by stikonas (4KiB - application/x-gzip)
file #17984:  wesnothd.6.gz added by stikonas (3KiB - application/x-gzip)

 

Depends on the following items: None found

Items that depend on this one: None found

 

Carbon-Copy List
  • -unavailable- added by cjwatson (Posted a comment)
  • -unavailable- added by stikonas (Submitted the item)
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    Follow 4 latest changes.

    Date Changed By Updated Field Previous Value => Replaced By
    Wed 22 Apr 2009 03:00:20 PM UTCcjwatsonStatusNone=>Wont Fix
      Open/ClosedOpen=>Closed
    Tue 21 Apr 2009 10:35:48 AM UTCstikonasAttached File-=>Added wesnoth.6.gz, #17983
      Attached File-=>Added wesnothd.6.gz, #17984

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