Printing MAN pages

Giorgos Keramidas keramida at freebsd.org
Thu Sep 8 16:28:07 PDT 2005


On 2005-09-08 17:33, Greg Barniskis <nalists at scls.lib.wi.us> wrote:
> Stijn Hoop wrote:
> [snip... sorry about the attributions]
> >>>
> >>>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.
> >
> >Hmm, no I didn't realize that. Guess that's too much work for such a minor
> >change :(
>
> Except that (if I read the thread right) the proposed change is
> actually to the man page for man, not the man page for groff. ;)
>
> Might suffer similar "ownership" and maintenance issues, but I doubt
> it. If man's not part of the native BSD core, what is?

Ah!  I misunderstood the original post then.  Thanks Greg!

Of course we can update man(1).  It's part of the src/gnu/ thirdparty
source, but the manpage is already off the vendor branch, so we can make
changes if necessary.

Stijn and everyone else, any particular preference for the text that we
add?  Would something like the following be ok?

	-t	Use ``/usr/bin/groff -S -man'' to format the manual page,
		passing the output to stdout.  The default output format of
		groff(1) is Postscript, but see the manual page of groff(1)
		for ways to pick an alternate format.

		Depending on the selected format and the availability of
		printing devices, the output may need to be passed through
		some filter or another before being printed.

We may have to send the changes we make to Federico Lucifredi too (the
maintainer of man-1.6 and latter), since the 1.6a version that I
downloaded from [ http://primates.ximian.com/~flucifredi/man/ ] a few
minutes ago, still uses the text that Stijn feels is a bit cryptic.

- Giorgos



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