man.output.encoding string man.output.encoding Encoding used for man-page output UTF-8 This parameter specifies the encoding to use for files generated by the manpages stylesheet. Not all processors support specification of this parameter. If the value of the man.charmap.enabled parameter is non-zero (the default), keeping the man.output.encoding parameter at its default value (UTF-8) or setting it to UTF-16 does not cause your man pages to be output in raw UTF-8 or UTF-16 -- because any Unicode characters for which matches are found in the enabled character map will be replaced with roff escape sequences before the final man-page files are generated. So if you want to generate "real" UTF-8 man pages, without any character substitution being performed on your content, you need to set man.charmap.enabled to zero (which will completely disable character-map processing). You may also need to set man.charmap.enabled to zero if you want to output man pages in an encoding other than UTF-8 or UTF-16. Character-map processing is based on Unicode character values and may not work with other output encodings.