A couple of posts ago, I wrote about fixing the incorrect characters that appear in man pages when using PuTTY. If, however, you see a box or rectangle where a character should be, then here’s the solution for that.
Although PuTTY and Cygwin support UTF-8, some fonts have more character coverage than others. In the case of PuTTY on Windows, most of the fixed-width fonts are missing some of the characters that are used in manual pages. As a result, a hollow box will appear in their place.
DejaVu Sans Mono is one fixed-width font that includes the required characters. Switch to it and your man pages will look good once more.
What other fixed-width fonts have good UTF-8 coverage? Share your findings in the comments.
The font Lucida Sans Unicode works correctly and looks great when running PuTTy from Windows 7.
@Paul: Thanks for the font tip!
On Windows 10, the Consolas font also properly displays the unicode dashes.
Thanks, Jon!