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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;

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.

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3 Answers

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.

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I tried changing to DejaVu Sans Mono but still the same issue: missing characters. –  user35042 Aug 22 '11 at 4:46
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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'.

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I tried this but it did not affect the appearance of the man pages. –  user35042 Aug 22 '11 at 4:47
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As my post states, the locale on the Ubuntu side is en_US.UTF-8 while Putty is set to use UTF-8. That does not seem to be enough to solve the problem. –  user35042 Aug 22 '11 at 4:49
If you use screen do you hit the same problems? –  Mircea Vutcovici Aug 22 '11 at 4:59
I typed screen and then man dpkg and I still see (or, rather, don't see) many of the characters. –  user35042 Aug 22 '11 at 5:04
See also the update. –  user35042 Aug 22 '11 at 5:10
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