Printing MAN pages

Bob Johnson fbsdlists at gmail.com
Thu Sep 8 13:57:05 PDT 2005


On 9/8/05, 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:
> > > On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 07:53:28PM +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> > > > Gerard Seibert wrote:
> > > > > I am trying to figure out how to print 'man' pages. If I try a
> simple
> > > > > redirect, such as: "man foo > foo.txt" the new file is loaded with
> > > > > control symbols, etc. that are not really printable. I want to save
> > > > > the files if possible, and print them out at a later date. It that
> is
> > > > > not possible, how would I go about printing them out in real time?
> > > > 
> > > > 	man -t foo > foo.ps
> > > > 
> > > > will generate Postscript output, which is a lot better for printing.
> > > 
[...]
> > > 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.
> 

In make.conf(5) it says


     PRINTERDEVICE
                   (str) The default format for system documentation, depends
                   on your printer.  This can be set to ``ascii'' for simple
                   printers, or ``ps'' for postscript or graphics printers
                   with a ghostscript filter, or both.


So does PRINTERDEVICE change the default output for groff, or does it
do something else, or nothing at all, and how does it affect your
proposed change?

- Bob


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