4 ms·

It would be cool if help2man worked perfectly. In fact the output needs a few fixups -- it looks like it has problems with non-ASCII characters? But if those f

It would be cool if help2man worked perfectly. In fact the output needs a few fixups -- it looks like it has problems with non-ASCII characters? But if those fixups can be made automatically it's not bad and I agree might be worth adding to the build.

enriquto 5y ago
Yes, the output of help2man is not perfect. My main gripe is that it imposes a rather strict format for the manpage, and not all manpage markup is available. But it is better than not having a manpage at all. The problem with non-ascii characters can be solved, though. Just add an option like "-L en_US.UTF-8" to the help2man call.
- da39a3ee 5y ago
  Thanks. However, now help2man is outputting the unicode character correctly, but `man $help2manOutput` is displaying things like `a(R)` and `a` instead of the unicode character. I've also tried with the `LOCALE=en_US.UTF-8` env var set.
  - enriquto 5y ago
    This sounds like a problem with your pager, that is used to scroll the output of man pages in the terminal. Do accents appear correctly on other manpages in your system? If I recall correctly, on macos catalina I had to set my locale variable LC_CTYPE (and not LOCALE) so that the less pager recognized the accents.
    - da39a3ee 5y ago
      I don't think it's a pager problem for the following reasons: - If I do `man help2manOutput | cat` then it does not page, but I still see `a` and `a(R)` in place of the desired unicode characters - `less help2manOutput` renders them correctly - In general I have no problem viewing unicode characters in less: I'm familiar with env vars such as LESS and PAGER.
      - enriquto 5y ago
        This is not the most appropriate place for this sort of fine-grained debugging. I'd suggest to try your generated manpage on another computer to see if it displays correctly. The only thing that I can say is that "it works for me" but of course this answer is not useful :) The main site of development for help2man seems to be this: https://salsa.debian.org/bod/help2man https://salsa.debian.org/bod/help2man I'm sure they'll accept pull requests that fix problems. Happy hacking!

enriquto 5y ago

Yes, the output of help2man is not perfect. My main gripe is that it imposes a rather strict format for the manpage, and not all manpage markup is available. But it is better than not having a manpage at all. The problem with non-ascii characters can be solved, though. Just add an option like "-L en_US.UTF-8" to the help2man call.

da39a3ee 5y ago
Thanks. However, now help2man is outputting the unicode character correctly, but `man $help2manOutput` is displaying things like `a(R)` and `a` instead of the unicode character. I've also tried with the `LOCALE=en_US.UTF-8` env var set.
- enriquto 5y ago
  This sounds like a problem with your pager, that is used to scroll the output of man pages in the terminal. Do accents appear correctly on other manpages in your system? If I recall correctly, on macos catalina I had to set my locale variable LC_CTYPE (and not LOCALE) so that the less pager recognized the accents.
  - da39a3ee 5y ago
    I don't think it's a pager problem for the following reasons: - If I do `man help2manOutput | cat` then it does not page, but I still see `a` and `a(R)` in place of the desired unicode characters - `less help2manOutput` renders them correctly - In general I have no problem viewing unicode characters in less: I'm familiar with env vars such as LESS and PAGER.
    - enriquto 5y ago
      This is not the most appropriate place for this sort of fine-grained debugging. I'd suggest to try your generated manpage on another computer to see if it displays correctly. The only thing that I can say is that "it works for me" but of course this answer is not useful :) The main site of development for help2man seems to be this: https://salsa.debian.org/bod/help2man https://salsa.debian.org/bod/help2man I'm sure they'll accept pull requests that fix problems. Happy hacking!