Michael,
This may be caused by the sophistication of your pager. Ordinarily, I use
'less' and I have a .lesskey file which tricks it out. I have the same
issue as you in that the pager output appears in the Qt terminal window but
the control characters such as 'f' for forward need to be typed in the
original shell window from which I launched octave-gui.
I can work around this by going down to the super dumb 'more' pager. If I
launch octave-gui and then do
PAGER ("/bin/more");
PAGER_FLAGS (" "); # Space between quotes
then reading the documentation, etc., works from within the Qt terminal
widget. This may just be an indication that Qt terminal is 99% equivalent
to a terminal, but not 100% compatible.
To be honest, I don't think so. The terminal widget is taken from Konsole source code. As Marco pointed out, this is most probably be due to inexistent configure tests, such that the numerous macros used in the KPTY source code are not defined properly.
Michael.