* Noah Sheppard <nhshepp...@taylor.edu> [2009-09-23 14:44 -0400]: > On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 02:37:21PM -0400, James Michael Fultz > wrote: [ ... ] > > Try less and 'col -b manual.txt | less' if the former doesn't > > display cleanly. The col command will strip embedded > > backspace sequences. > > That worked, thanks for the tip (although col complained > "Invalid or incomplete multibyte or wide character"). Also, > when I zcat the downloaded gz, and run it through col, I get > truncated at exactly the same point (right after "Mutt is > Copyright"). If, however, I zcat the file directly to less > without col, everything displays correctly, with the bolding, > and in its entirety, all the way to the end of chapter 10.
$ zcat manual.txt.gz | col -b | less Works fine here -- Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit. Maybe there's a bug in your version col? Could be a hint here as to the state of the uncompressed copy of 'manual.txt' on the server. Hmm. Does appear that some versions of col don't handle UTF-8. For example: <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=319952> A workaround appears to be to use 'col -bxp'. > Perhaps there is some character in manual.txt which is causing > truncation somewhere, perhaps server-side, or perhaps in wget, > less, and firefox (for the uncompressed manual.txt). Maybe > some library on our systems common to all those which does not > like some special character? Just a guess. I think that the file as it is saved on the server is truncated. I would also chance to guess that col is used to process it, and the same bug or a similar bug to the one you've experienced affects it there as well.
