Printing MAN pages

Giorgos Keramidas keramida at ceid.upatras.gr
Thu Sep 8 13:46:34 PDT 2005


On 2005-09-08 22:32, Stijn Hoop <stijn at win.tue.nl> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 07:55:19PM +0200, Erik Trulsson wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 07:36:46PM +0200, Stijn Hoop wrote:
> > > Highly useful to know, but shouldn't we update the man page for man(1)?
> > >
> > >      -t          Use /usr/bin/groff -S -man to format the manual page, passing
> > >                  the output to stdout.  The output from /usr/bin/groff -S -man
> > >                  may need to be passed through some filter or another before
> > >                  being printed.
> > >
> > > This does not exactly spell 'output postscript' to me...
> >
> > It does if you know that postscript is the default output format of
> > groff.   If one doesn't know what format groff outputs by default, it is
> > easily learned by reading the groff(1) manpage.
>
> True. I'm all in favor of a little bit more userfriendliness in man pages
> as long as it's not overkill though.
>
> How about:
>
> 	-t	Generate a Postscript version of the manpage, intended for
> 		printing, by using /usr/bin/groff -S -man to format the manual
> 		page, passing the output to stdout.  The output from
> 		/usr/bin/groff -S -man may need to be passed through some
> 		filter or another before being printed.
>
> That way I can do /print in less and still get some useful hint.

You all know that groff is thirdparty software, right?  We have to take
this with the groff developers, if the change is ever going to be
imported in FreeBSD.

Having said that, I'm in favor of making manpages more useful by a
little verbosity (but not too much).



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