Printing MAN pages

[Stijn Hoop]

On Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 02:28:03AM +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> 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.

This is much better already; I inserted the word 'printing' in my version
because I felt I would search for that when loooking for a way to print
a manpage, but I'm not hung up on that. This would definitely be an
improvement.

Thanks for picking this up, Giorgos!

--Stijn

-- 
Apparently, 1 in 5 people in the world are Chinese. And there are 5 people
in my family, so it must be one of them. It's either my mum or my dad......
or maybe my older brother John. Or my younger brother Ho-Cha-Chu. But I'm
pretty sure it's John.
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