man pages in plain text - how to?
Alex Zbyslaw
xfb52 at dial.pipex.com
Tue Jun 13 10:10:55 UTC 2006
gs_stoller at juno.com wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Jun 2006 15:28:07 -0400 , Charles Swiger wrote:
><snip>
>
>
>>On Jun 9, 2006, at 3:01 PM, Wayne wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Was wondering how to get "man" to output pages in plain text? I want
>>>the basic formating (indentation & whatnot) but NOT the bold and other
>>>special effects. Just ascii text I can grep through. I tried setting
>>>the terminal type to "dumb" and the stupid thing still tries to do
>>>back-space overstrike bolding (jeesh - even LA-120s had fancier print
>>>capabilities than that, IIRC.)
>>>
>>>
><snip>
> The easiest way to do it, I believe, is with col . (Just try 'man
>col' to check all the options.) I have used 'man topic | col -b' to
>see the man page for topic with all the egregious stuff removed, and
>I just append to the pipeline '>topic.man' if I want to save it.
>
>
>
>
Or, e.g.:
gzcat /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz | nroff -man -Tascii | colcrt
Man is just calling nroff (unless there's a pre-cat-ed page).
--Alex
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