Re: How does Cygwin handle non-Latin1 man pages? (move to UTF-8?)

[Erwin Waterlander <waterlan@xs4all.nl>]

Erwin Waterlander schreef, Op 24-9-2013 22:01:
> Hi,
>
> As far as I see it, on Cygwin it is assumed that man pages are encoded 
> in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1).
> For instance the man pages of vim.
>
> /usr/share/man/fr/vim.1.gz is encoded in Latin-1.
>
> $ export LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
> $ man vim
>
> This will show the French man page correctly. Latin-1 is converted to 
> UTF-8.
>
> For the Russian translation of the vim manual I see two files:
> /usr/share/man/ru.UTF-8/man1/vim.1.gz
> /usr/share/man/ru.KOI8-R/man1/vim.1.gz
>
>
> When I type
> $ export LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
> $ man vim
>
> I get the English man page, instead of the Russian man page.
> I think because there is no /usr/share/man/ru/man1/vim.1.gz present.
>

The problem is here that man looks for the manual in these directories 
in this order:
/usr/share/man/ru_RU.UTF-8
/usr/share/man/ru_RU
/usr/share/man/ru

All three paths are not present on Cygwin.
I could set LANG to ru.UTF-8, but this is not common practice. Normally 
you set LANG to ru_RU.UTF-8. Therefore I think that the non-Latin1 
folders under /usr/share/man have the wrong name.
When I set LANG to ru.UTF-8, man finds the Russian man page, but 
displays it wrongly. Even when I fix the NROFF line in /etc/man.conf.
Moving /usr/share/man/ru.UTF-8 to /usr/share/man/ru_RU.UTF-8 (and fixing 
man.conf) makes the man page display properly. This confirms that the 
non-latin1 directories have the wrong name in Cygwin.

> When I type
>
> $ export LANG=ru_RU.UTF-8
> $ export LANGUAGE=ru.UTF-8
> $ man vim
>
> The Russian man page is displayed, but all Russian characters are 
> wrongly displayed.
> I think because it is assumed the man page is in Latin-1.
>
> To get a correct display of the Russian man page I need to change 
> /etc/man.config
> I change the line with NROFF to:
> NROFF         /usr/bin/preconv | /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc 2>/dev/null
>
> Now the Russian man page displays correctly, but now all the Latin-1 
> pages display wrongly.

This can be fixed by adding a coding tag to the first or second line of 
the man page, which is understood by preconv.
When I set LANG to fr_FR.UTF-8, move /usr/share/man/fr.UTF-8 to 
/usr/share/man/fr_FR.UTF-8, and add this tag to vim.1

.\" -*- coding: latin-1; -*-

The French manual displays properly.


>
> So I undo my change in /etc/man.conf
>
>
> On Linux the trend is to convert all man pages to UTF-8 encoding.
> Will Cygwin follow this trend?
>
>

The following needs to be done in Cygwin to have man pages for all 
scripts displayed properly out of the box (assuming an UTF-8 locale and 
use of mintty):

* Rename the non-latin1 directories under /usr/share/man/ to 
fr_FR.UTF-8, ru_RU.UTF-8, and so on.
* Change /etc/man.conf to use preconv:
NROFF         /usr/bin/preconv | /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc 2>/dev/null
* Convert all Latin-1 coded man pages to UTF-8, or add a latin-1 coding 
tag on the first line.

regards,

-- 
Erwin Waterlander
http://waterlan.home.xs4all.nl/


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