Hi there. Since the charset doesn't seem to be the problem, maybe this will help.
Did some digging and found a bug report against redhat version 8 concerning terminal codes in perldoc output. There were comments about this being a bug in groff. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=72125 They fixed it by making the default options for less be -isr You can do this on a linux box with: LESS="-isr";export LESS The -r option causes terminal control sequences to be send as is, without being quoted. See: man less for more info. there may be some other options for less that will work better on different operating systems. There are a couple other environment variables that look like they may help. Also, man lesskey provides various other ways to change the defaults for less on different OS's. Mike