man -t odd page size

[Polytropon]

Hi!

On Wed, 22 Oct 2008 21:56:20 -0200, Gonzalo Nemmi <gnemmi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there an easy way to get man to format the man page using plain good ISO 
> 216 standard A4 page size?

My suggfestion for an attempt would be to first strip any control
characters from the output of "man -P cat <entry>" and then pipe
it to an ASCII to PDF converter (a2ps, if I remember correctly);
this would remove any markups, I know, but would lead to a PDF
output using the system's default paper size, A4 (I hope).

I know this is not the best idea, but it should be accomplishable
without many problems. A better idea would be to write a simple
filter that convert the man page (including formatting characters)
into LaTeX source and then run it through pdflatex.



> and on a side note: will we ever get to see ISO 216 A4 as the default choice 
> for output instead of not-standard, only usefull in the US but useless in the 
> rest of the whole world "letter" page size and the likes???

You're getting my thoughts, man. :-) I'd like to see this happen,
too, but I don't think the developers of FreeBSD and all the fine
applications will say goodbye to their Letter, Legal, Exec etc.
paper formats. A4 isn't a DIN standard anymore, its ISO for many
years now, and unlike Letter, it has the ability to be scaled
(to half size, to quarter size, to double size) easily. Today,
the manual replacement of many different settings is needed to
get a system A4 compliant.

Greetings from Germany, where A4 is the standard for more than
a century now. =^_^=



-- 
Polytropon
>From Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...