GNU bug report logs - #77012
Documentation problem: odd characters in ASCII text format manual

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Giacomo De Bello <giacomodebello <at> hotmail.it>
To: "bug-grep <at> gnu.org" <bug-grep <at> gnu.org>
Subject: Documentation problem: odd characters in ASCII text format manual
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2025 09:22:23 +0000

Greetings, the manual file in ASCII text format is filled with odd characters, and maybe this is a character conversion problem during the file generation.
In example, you can see the problem in the third line of the plain text manual online

https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.txt

I quote:

2 Invoking ‘grep’

It should be

2 Invoking grep

or

2 Invoking 'grep'

or something else. As far as I can see, the HTML format of the manual has the word "grep" between <code> tags, and I guess the problem is or was somewhat related to that, in docbook2txt or gendocs.sh; I said "was" because maybe just relaunching gendocs.sh will fix that, as the document was last updated May 13, 2023. Regards.

Message #8 received at 77012 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Giacomo De Bello <giacomodebello <at> hotmail.it>
Cc: savannah-hackers <at> gnu.org, 77012 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#77012: Documentation problem: odd characters in ASCII text
 format manual
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2025 10:38:30 -0700

On 2025-03-14 02:22, Giacomo De Bello wrote:
> Greetings, the manual file in ASCII text format is filled with odd characters, and maybe this is a character conversion problem during the file generation.
> In example, you can see the problem in the third line of the plain text manual online
> 
> https://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.txt

Unfortunately the Savannah web server responds with a header that lacks 
the line "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8", needed because this 
file uses UTF-8 encoding, not ASCII.

I attempted to fix the server bug by adding an .htaccess file like this:

  <Files ".txt">
    AddDefaultCharset utf-8
    ForceType text/plain
  </Files>

at grep's root, but no dice.

Although possibly I messed up the CVS commit (I never remember how to 
use CVS any more), Savannah is reeeeallly slow right now and I'm getting 
a "502 Bad Gateway" when I try to visit, for example, 
<http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/grep/> to try to debug this. So 
I'll cc this email to savannah-hackers to see whether they can fix the 
UTF-8 issue for me.

Thanks for the reporting the problem.

Message #11 received at 77012 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Giacomo De Bello <giacomodebello <at> hotmail.it>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: "savannah-hackers <at> gnu.org" <savannah-hackers <at> gnu.org>,
 "77012 <at> debbugs.gnu.org" <77012 <at> debbugs.gnu.org>
Subject: Re: bug#77012: Documentation problem: odd characters in ASCII text
 format manual
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2025 19:42:38 +0000

On 2025-03-14 18:38, Paul Eggert wrote:

> the Savannah web server responds with a header that lacks
> the line "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8", needed because
> this file uses UTF-8 encoding, not ASCII.

Trying to be helpful, I found that Savannah migrated to "updated
systems" in November 2016, and the grep.txt page was OK before [2],
and problematic after [3] the upgrade.
Anyway, another project, alive [4], has a similar problem starting from
a day between May [5] and October [6] 2013.
But I'll stop here, to avoid noise and to go off topic.

> Savannah is reeeeallly slow right now and I'm gettinga "502 Bad
> Gateway" when I try to visit, for example,
> <http://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/grep/>

Same here.

> So I'll cc this email to savannah-hackers to see whether they can fix
> the UTF-8 issue for me.

Same.

> Thanks for the reporting the problem.

Thanks for your efforts.

[1] https://savannah.nongnu.org/news/?id=8710
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20151225120101/http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.txt
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20161224123914/http://www.gnu.org/software/grep/manual/grep.txt
[4] http://www.gnu.org/software/alive/manual/alive.txt
[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20130517082946/http://www.gnu.org/software/alive/manual/alive.txt
[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20131010110923/http://www.gnu.org/software/alive/manual/alive.txt

Message #16 received at 77012-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Giacomo De Bello <giacomodebello <at> hotmail.it>
Cc: savannah-hackers <at> gnu.org, 77012-done <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#77012: Documentation problem: odd characters in ASCII text
 format manual
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2025 12:59:05 -0700

Thanks for the further investigation. I solved the problem for grep by 
installing the following patch, and am closing the bug report.

https://web.cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/grep/grep/.htaccess?r1=1.1&r2=1.2

Presumably GNU project web pages should routinely have .htaccess files 
that say something like this:

  <Files "*.txt">
    AddDefaultCharset utf-8
    ForceType text/plain
  </Files>

as the old Windows-1252 default no longer makes sense. I'll take a look 
at doing this for the projects I help maintain.

Alternatively (and more efficiently) this could be addressed by changing 
the Apache configuration on Savannah; however, I lack admin access for that.

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