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.
Post a comment
Related posts:
Do you see strange characters on man pages in your Cygwin? After upgrading to Cygwin 1.7, I noticed that the soft hyphens in man pages were replaced with the “â” character. Somehow, the character set wasn’t right. I remember having to deal with this problem several years ago, but couldn’t recall how I solved it. I found some old messages floating around the web going back at least a decade about setting environment variables, locales and whatnot to cure this. Fortunately, the solution turned out to be easy with the latest Cygwin and PuTTY.
As it turns out, Cygwin 1.7 now defaults to using the UTF-8 character set. PuTTY, at least on my system in the US, defaults to ISO-8859-1, a.k.a Latin-1. So, the fix is as follows:
- Open the PuTTY Configuration dialog
- Under the Window category, click on Translation
- In the “Character set translation on received data” section, select UTF-8 in the drop down list box
- Save the configuration
Now man pages look normal again. Of course, if you’ve changed the locale and/or character set in your Cygwin to something other than UTF-8, be sure to set PuTTY’s character set to match.
Are you using a different terminal/ssh program with Cygwin than PuTTY and encountering this? Share the corresponding steps to apply the cure for your terminal emulator in the comments.
Post a comment
Today, my Pidgin IM client started giving the error, “Received unexpected response from http://api.oscar.aol.com/aim/startOSCARSession”, when connecting to the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) server. Apparently, it can also happen when connecting to ICQ. Fortuantely, the fix/workaround on Windows and Linux is really easy.
- Go to Accounts
- Modify the AIM or ICQ account
- On the Advanced tab, clear the checkbox labeled Use clientLogin
- Save
Are you using Adium? It may also have this issue on the Mac. If you’ve solved it, post the steps in a reply.
Update: Alternatively, in step 3, you can clear the checkbox labeled Use SSL
Post a comment
Previously in the post, Fix Firefox Crash with Yahoo Mail, I covered a very simple way to eliminate a very frequently occurring crash problem due to a conflict between ad blocking addons and a module installed by Yahoo! Instant Messenger.
That fix significantly reduced the crashes that I encountered. However, I was still getting occasional crashes under the same circumstances with Yahoo! Mail. But, I’ve tracked that down and, so far, seem to have alleviated all the crashes.
I’ve been using two different ad blocking addons for Firefox, AdBlock and AdBlock Plus, though not on the same operating system. On the computer that was still having a crashing problem, which was running Windows XP, I had AdBlock installed. Switching to AdBlock Plus made the difference.
So, should you just switch to AdBlock Plus and not use the previous fix? Not so fast. The previous fix works even if you don’t use any ad blocking add-on. So, start with it first.
Have other helpful fixes for Firefox or improvements to this fix? Post it in the comments.
Post a comment
Related posts:
Yesterday, someone at work was having a problem where his Firefox would no longer download files. The Downloads dialog was empty but Firefox refused to downloading anything even when selecting to save manually.
This is usually caused by a corrupt completed-downloads file. Here’s how to fix this download problem:
- Close Firefox
- Open your favorite file manager and go to your profile folder:
Windows XP: C:Documents and Settingsyour_Windows_login_nameApplication DataMozillaFirefoxProfilesa_bunch_of_letters_and_numbers.profile_name
Linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/a_bunch_of_letters_and_numbers.profile_name
- Delete the file named downloads.rdf
- Start Firefox
That’s all, folks!
Post a comment
Related posts:
