There are two problems associated with using man under non-iso-8859-1 (or derivatives) locale.
1. There are several special characters used in formatting. I can name at least: - soft hyphenation - bullets used in list - right accent (in quotations like `someword') All these are mapped to characters from upper part of iso-8859-1; when you are using any KOI8-R they are displayed as pseudo graphic with really ugly results. Note that nroff (used in man) is already shell script here so I am thinking about checking current locale and adding -m parameter that would override these definitions. I know how to redefine shc - how can I redefine \(bu and right accent? Does it sound reasonable? 2. Russian manual pages badly need hyphenation, because average word length in Russian is even larger than in English. I tried to grab TeX pattern file and format it with example of hyphen.us but it does not work. I have tried bot - literal text (in KOI8-R) - translated into \[charXXX] (thinking groff may be confused by upper characters). Is it possible at all? Another problem is _when_ to use Russian hyphenation (assuming it is possible). It must depend on man page contents not on any locale set. Is it possible to set extra parameters in man.conf depending on man directory? In this case we could call nroff for /usr/share/man/ru/* with explicit -m... that loads Russian table. TIA -andrej
