Have you tried "LESSCHARSET=latin1; export LESSCHARSET"?

On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Marc Baudoin wrote:

> Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr> écrit :
> > On Oct 24, John Kohl wrote
> > > Is there a LANG I can set which will tell less(1) to display ISO-8859-1
> > > characters naturally, and not as <XX> hex codes?
> > > 
> > > I tried "fr" but that doesn't work :(
> > 
> > LC_CTYPE=iso_8859_1, and install the /usr/share/locale/iso_8859_1
> > from /pub/NetBSD/arch/i386/french. This way you'll have ISO-8859-1 in
> > less and all other utilities (such as vi :)
> 
> Works fine except when the LANG environment variable is set.  The
> problem is this variable is useful for displaying messages in the
> appropriate language.