OT: Strange output of shell"man xyz" on OS X

[Wouter]

On 31 May 2006, at 12:52, Klaus Major wrote:

> Hi Alex,
>
>> Klaus Major wrote:
>>> Hi Bill,
>>>> Underscore. The boxes are backspace characters.
>>>
>>> Aha, thanks :-)
>>> Any hints on how to clean up this to display this nicely in a Rev  
>>> field?
>> You do it based on the backspaces (numtochar(8))s.
>>
>> Depends how nicely you need it.
>
> VERY nice :-)

-snip-

Hi,
from an old project for what it is worth (will display the manpage as  
in the terminal):
(beware of the mail wraps!!!)

set the htmltext of fld <somename> to prepMan(<raw manpage>)

local lC
function prepMan pMan
   if the keys of lC = "" then preplC
   put numtochar(8) into tx
   set the casesensitive to true
   put "" into tChars
   put "<p>" into tList
   repeat for each char i in pMan
     if i = cr then put numtochar(13) into i
     if i = space then put numtochar(14) into i
     if tChars[1] = "" then -- may not be tx
       if i = tx then next repeat
       else
         put i into tChars[1]
       end if
     else
       if tChars[2] = "" then -- must be tx
         if i = tx then put i into tChars[2]
         else
           put chartonum(tChars[1]) into a
           put lC[a] after tList
           put i into tChars[1]
         end if
       else
         if tChars[3] = "" then -- may not be tx
           if i <> tx then put i into tChars[3]
           else
             put chartonum(tChars[1]) into a
             put lC[a] after tList
             put "" into tChars
           end if
         else
           if tChars[4] = "" then -- must be tx for sequence
             if i = tx then put i into tChars[4]
             else
               if tChars[1] = tChars[3] then put "<b>"&lC[chartonum 
(tChars[3])]&"</b>" after tList
               else if tChars[1] = "_" then put "<u>"&lC[chartonum 
(tChars[3])]&"</u>" after tList
               else if tChars[1] = "+" and tChars[3] = "o" then put  
"<u>"&lC[chartonum(tChars[3])]&"</u>" after tList
               else put lC[chartonum(tChars[3])] after tList
               put "" into tChars
               put i into tChars[1]
             end if
           else
             if tChars[3] = i then put "<b>"&lC[chartonum(i)]&"</b>"  
into tTemp
             if tChars[1] = "_" then put "<u>" & tTemp & "</u>" into  
tTemp
             put tTemp after tList
             put "" into tChars
           end if
         end if
       end if
     end if
   end repeat
   return tList & "</p>"
end prepMan

on preplC
   repeat with i = 33 to 255
     put numtochar(i) into fld "temp" ### hidden field
     put char 4 to -5 of the htmltext of fld "temp" into lC[i]
   end repeat
   put "</p>" & cr & "<p>" into lC["13"]  -- cr > more readable in  
the debugger
   put space into lC["14"]
end preplC

Greetings,
Wouter