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

[Erwin Waterlander <waterlan@xs4all.nl>]

Erwin Waterlander schreef, Op 25-9-2013 21:50:
>
> 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.

Actually this is not working. Somewhere the coding tag is lost, although 
preconv seems to do a good job. I reported this three years ago to the 
maintainers of man an groff, but it appears it is still not fixed.

>
>
>>
>> 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 

Since the coding tag is not working it is best to convert all man pages 
to UTF-8.

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


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