I know I found a workaround for this ages ago, but have since forgotten and can't narrow my searches enough to find an answer.

If I open a full screen app in CLI, so for example elinks, instead of showing borders, etc, I get various ascii foreign characters (a lowercase a with a hat on it for example).

Now for man pages, this fix is to edit man.conf and modify the groff parameters. As I recall the previous fix I had, there was a program called prior to the app, so something like

solution elinks

I may be way off track there though, since if I could actually remember, I wouldn't need to ask

Rgds

CTRL+ALT+F1 log in and run what ever CLI program you want

???
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that would just get me out of the GUI which I'm not in to start with.

Update - I can alter the behaviour from Putty by altering the character setup, but I'm sure I shouldn't have to. I did work out that if I ssh from arch, character encoding is OK. Perhaps it's just a Putty issue - I'll try more connection types

It could also be a problem with the fonts you have set on the system
from the post it looked like you were running in an Xterm
did you use the default fonts when you installed the system in the first place
on an older slackware version I set one of the (so called ) custom fonts
and most of the programs didn't display right

sorry I should have looked at the profile next to the post your no noob

Actually I'm ssh'ing in, so it's the terminal emulator fonts that are the issue, but the general problem is character sets rather than fonts per se

I only got symptoms like you describe when my console-fonts where not set correctly - for instance: no unicode-capable font (or not the right one for the language) was set while my system and the applications where set to use unicode.
I use Gentoo and there the settings for consolefont and font-translation are configured in /etc/conf.d/consolefont
That is all I can say.

hi if i press CTRL+ALT+F1, how do i get back to GUI??
thanks

Not by hijacking other people's threads, that's for sure.

Start a new one