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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.
by 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 agoThanks. 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 agoThis 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 agoI 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 agoThis 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!