Woodsmt,
The default character encoding under Redhat 8 is UTF-8. That means that UNICODE characters may be encoded into a string of multiple characters for transmission to the client.
The characters that are most affected in US-English systems are the line-draw characters and hyphen characters. That is why screen oriented apps and man pages are adversely affected.
To compensate, the client must understand and decode UTF-8 data into the proper UNICODE characters on the client system and an appropriate font must be selected. In AbsoluteTelnet 2.11, you can make these choices on the Options->Properties->Appearance tab by choosing the UTF-8 character translation and choosing a good font like 'Courier New' or 'Lucida Console'.
There *may* still be issues in AbsoluteTelnet 2.11 with the display of hyphen characters. A Unicode 'hyphen' is a different character from an ASCII minus '-', and most US English fonts do not include one. AbsoluteTelnet 2.12 beta addresses this by displaying a minus in place of a hyphen.
You can download the new beta here if you wish:
http://www.celestialsoftware.net/telnet/beta_software.html