[hardy] console quote (in man) corruption

[Dave Gilbert]

Hi,
  I switched to a VC with ctrl-alt-f1 (after accidentally ctrl-alt-backspacing restarting X) and found that
the ' characters in manpages were corrupt; It was both apostrophes (e.g. it's) and those used
for quoting (which I suspect are the beginning/end variety).

The characters were rendered as a blob; there was a different blob for the beginning and ending
quote.

This is a machine upgraded from Gutsy with an Intel 945GM - all the rest of the text was fine, so I suggest
maybe the console font is missing some entries or can't cope with none-ascii properly?

Dave

[Reuben Thomas (rrt)]

In fact, straight quotes are not affected, only curly quotes; but man uses curly quotes in e.g. "it's" in UTF-8 locales.

[Reuben Thomas (rrt)]

Running "setupcon" on a VT with this corruption problem fixes it.

[Michael Nagel (nailor)]

can i close this bug then or should this be fixed globally somewhere?

[Reuben Thomas (rrt)]

The bug should be fixed, surely? I just found a way of fixing the effect once it occurs, not a fix for the bug.

[Michael Nagel (nailor)]

the bug should be marked as affecting a certain package so a developer can have a look at it. but i doubt that the man program is the culprit. any idea?

[Reuben Thomas (rrt)]

It's the console font that is being corrupted, so I'd file it against whichever package sets up the console font as a reasonable target; but I have no idea what actually corrupts the data. Presumably if something I run can corrupt the font data, that's a bug in whatever manages the fonts (with obvious potential security holes: imagine a malicious program which simply redefines characters to be each other).

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thanks for your report. This is bug 130444. (It isn't a security problem; it's just that the console isn't set up properly on boot.)