Using Putty results in missing characters on man pages

Question

I am using Putty 0.61 to ssh into an Ubuntu server (10.04.3) from Windows 7. Whenever I try to view a man page, inevitably there are many characters that are missing from the man page.

The TERM environment variable is set to xterm. The locale command says that LANG=en_US.UTF-8. Putty is set to use UTF-8 under the Translation menu. Here is the output of stty -a:

speed 38400 baud; rows 33; columns 114; line = 0;
intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = <undef>; eol2 = <undef>; swtch = <undef>; start = ^Q;
stop = ^S; susp = ^Z; rprnt = ^R; werase = ^W; lnext = ^V; flush = ^O; min = 1; time = 0;
-parenb -parodd cs8 -hupcl -cstopb cread -clocal -crtscts
-ignbrk -brkint -ignpar -parmrk -inpck -istrip -inlcr -igncr icrnl ixon -ixoff -iuclc -ixany -imaxbel -iutf8
opost -olcuc -ocrnl onlcr -onocr -onlret -ofill -ofdel nl0 cr0 tab0 bs0 vt0 ff0
isig icanon iexten echo echoe echok -echonl -noflsh -xcase -tostop -echoprt echoctl echoke

The font I am using in Putty is Courier New.

Another strange terminal issue is that when using Emacs and doing auto-complete for files, the first letter of the file is missing.

UPDATE (2011-08-21): If I use my mouse to select a region of the displayed man page, then the screen colors invert: my normal background of white turns black and the text itself turns from back to white. This is to be expected, but the strange thing is that when this happens I can also see the missing text! The missing text that shows up when highlighted seems to be a shade of grey. So, it has something to do with how colors are displayed.

If I check the box "Use system colours" under "Windows|Colours" in Putty, I can now see the missing/invisible text.

Answer 1

This is usually a font issue. Fonts often lack glyphs for many characters, so try some different ones. DejaVu Sans Mono is free and fairly comprehensive.

Answer 2

export LANG=C

I bet your man pages will work fine =)

If you don't have a reason to be using unicode manpages this will turn it off and set programs to use their 'default'.

Answer 3

PuTTY's default translation is ISO-Latin-1. Ubuntu's default console locale is based on UTF-8. You have to change one of them to match the other. In PuTTY, change the translation to UTF-8, or from terminal set the locale with LC_ALL to ISO-Latin-1.