Nowadays mandb has provision to understand a character set
encoding that is explicitly indicated in the first line
of the source. As pointed out by Colin Watson, including
such an explicit indication on pages encoded in anything
other than ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8 is useful for man-pages
that aren't shipped in UTF-8.
See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=519209
and for some other background (responded to by Colin Watson
in the above report):
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.internationalization.linux/6040
("man page encoding", 5 Jul 2005)
Reported-by: Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Michael Kerrisk