Dashes showing as empty boxes in man pages in a Cygwin/X terminal

Question

Pretty much what the title says, works fine in a plain (non-X) Cygwin window. It's probably a charset thing. In case it's related:

$ echo $LANG
C.UTF-8

I ungzipped the man page for less and the start looks like so:

.TH LESS 1 "Version 429: 11 Apr 2009"
.SH NAME
less \- opposite of more

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Answer 1

Use the mintty terminal or do 'alias man="LANG=C man"'.

Answer 2

I fixed mine by setting my terminal (PuTTY) to UTF-8. PuTTY defaults to Latin-1 but Cygwin 1.7 now defaults to UTF-8. Check your terminal configuration.

http://turbulentsky.com/cygwin-funny-characters-man-pages-putty.html