Software :: Terminal And Konsole Windows Show Strange Characters

When I open a terminal or konsole window, output (either STDOUT or STDERR) sometimes contains funny characters instead of something meaningful. Can someone explain how I might correct this situation?

ANALYSIS:
One very repeatable example involves using the manual page command

Code:
man set... man page output ...upstart - event-based init daemon

In my copy of the output, there are several problems in the very first screen. In the synopsis section, there is "{ value | ?value? ..." Replace the '?' with a lower-case-a-under-a-carat character (a-hat).
I suspect the garble character might be apostrophe in real life.

In other places, I see var?/able or how?/ever or trans?/action where the '?' is again a-hat and the '/' represents end of line or newline. I suspect the garble character might be a hyphen in real life.

All of this suggests that there is a conflict between the character stream written to STDOUT by the man command and the character-display settings (is that "code page" or similar?) of the specific terminal or konsole in use.

In specific, I use konsole v1.6.6 from KDE v3.5.10. In general, I'm running Ubuntu Hardy (v8.04.3 LTS).