Yes, the output of help2man is not perfect. My main gripe is that it imposes a rather strict format for the manpage, and not all manpage markup is available. But it is better than not having a manpage at all.

The problem with non-ascii characters can be solved, though. Just add an option like "-L en_US.UTF-8" to the help2man call.

Thanks. However, now help2man is outputting the unicode character correctly, but `man $help2manOutput` is displaying things like `a(R)` and `a` instead of the unicode character. I've also tried with the `LOCALE=en_US.UTF-8` env var set.

This sounds like a problem with your pager, that is used to scroll the output of man pages in the terminal. Do accents appear correctly on other manpages in your system? If I recall correctly, on macos catalina I had to set my locale variable LC_CTYPE (and not LOCALE) so that the less pager recognized the accents.

I don't think it's a pager problem for the following reasons:

- If I do `man help2manOutput | cat` then it does not page, but I still see `a` and `a(R)` in place of the desired unicode characters

- `less help2manOutput` renders them correctly

- In general I have no problem viewing unicode characters in less: I'm familiar with env vars such as LESS and PAGER.

This is not the most appropriate place for this sort of fine-grained debugging. I'd suggest to try your generated manpage on another computer to see if it displays correctly. The only thing that I can say is that "it works for me" but of course this answer is not useful :)

The main site of development for help2man seems to be this:

https://salsa.debian.org/bod/help2man

I'm sure they'll accept pull requests that fix problems. Happy hacking!