strange characters in PuTTy

[lance]

Hi,

I'm SSHing into my RedHat8.0 box from a W2K box running PuTTy. It works
fine, but some of the charactrers in the terminal window, ( eg the hyphen
character ) are being replaced with incorrect ones. For example, the hyphen
is replaced by a lower-case 'a' with a caret '^' above it. I have tried
altering the 'translation' from PuTTy to different character sets, with
similar results. The characters are only replaced incorrectly in text shown
from the terminal, not text I input - if I type 'man -a rpm' the '-a' part
comes out fine, but the return manpage has every hyphen replaced.

I use the ISO 8859-1 character set ( Western Europe )

How do I check the current character set for a session in RedHat?
Does SSH have it's own character settings? How can I check those?

I am not certain if it is a PuTTy issue, a RedHat issue or a SSH issue! Any
suggestions?

[Graham Vincent]

Hello Lance.

I was seeing similar things in a konsole window on my RH 8.0 box. The only
way I could get it to show the correct characters was to give up on
English_NZ as my character set and edit the /etc/sysconfig/i18n file to
show LANG="en_US" and restart xfs.

Not sure if will fix your problem - good luck.

Regards,

Graham

[Jacob Nevins]

lance <lanc...@hotmail.com> writes:
>I'm SSHing into my RedHat8.0 box from a W2K box running PuTTy. It works
>fine, but some of the charactrers in the terminal window, ( eg the hyphen
>character ) are being replaced with incorrect ones. For example, the hyphen
>is replaced by a lower-case 'a' with a caret '^' above it. I have tried
>altering the 'translation' from PuTTy to different character sets, with
>similar results.

Have you tried UTF-8 translation in PuTTY? Just a hunch.

groff tends to use a soft hyphen character if one's available -- it
uses the ISO8859-1 0xAD "SOFT HYPHEN" on my (Debian potato) system.

>I use the ISO 8859-1 character set ( Western Europe )

Latin small a with circumflex indicates U+2XXX in UTF-8 interpreted
as latin1; there are some plausible dashes and hyphens at the start of
that range.

If groff were trying to use U+00AD I would expect to see C2 AD in an
8859-1 terminal (i.e. upper-case A circumflex plus the expected
hyphen).

>The characters are only replaced incorrectly in text shown
>from the terminal, not text I input - if I type 'man -a rpm' the '-a' part
>comes out fine, but the return manpage has every hyphen replaced.

That's not surprising, as you're typing a normal ASCII hyphen. I would
expect that any in-line hyphens in the man page (e.g. "(C) 1989-1999")
would come out OK also.

>How do I check the current character set for a session in RedHat?

This isn't a complete answer, but it's possible you may have to muck
around with LESSCHARSET (assuming man uses less for browsing).

>Does SSH have it's own character settings? How can I check those?

The SSH protocol doesn't, but the terminal emulator does -- in PuTTY,
you set the default state, but this can be changed via escape
sequences. I don't know whether anything in RH8 attempts to do this.

[lance]

Thanks Graham,

Your fix did seem to work. dunno why, though, as I tried both western and
UTF-8 in PuTTy with no luck. For reference here is what my i18n file
contained:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"

I took out all referenced to UTF-8 and now PuTTy shows everything all
peachy-keen! Happy hyphens! It makes reading the man pages much easier!

"Graham Vincent" <gra...@gpv.co.nz> wrote in message
news:pan.2002.11.06....@gpv.co.nz...