Why does PuTTYcyg display â instead of hyphen in man pages?

Question

I've been using PuTTYcyg as a Cygwin terminal, but it doesn't render dashes in manual pages correctly. For example, the top of man gcc looks like

GCC(1)                                GNU                               GCC(1)

NAME
       gcc â GNU project C and C++ compiler

SYNOPSIS
       gcc [âc|âS|âE] [âstd=standard]
           [âg] [âpg] [âOlevel]
           [âWwarn...] [âpedantic]
           [âIdir...] [âLdir...]
           [âDmacro[=defn]...] [âUmacro]
           [âfoption...] [âmmachineâoption...]
           [âo outfile] infile...

Changing fonts doesn't help. How can I fix this?

Answer 1

1. With PuTTYcyg running, right click the icon at the top left and select "Change Settings..."
2. In the Category pane under Window, select Translation.
3. Change the assumed character set to UTF-8 as in the image below:

Don't forget to save your new settings as the default on the Session page. Click Apply and enjoy!