man -t odd page size

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Polytropon wrote:

> 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).

But groff can do A4.  Just as a first pass:

zcat `man -w ls` | groff -Tps -dpaper=a4 -P-pa4 -mandoc | ps2pdf - tmp.pdf

It produces the right media size in the PS file, but I can't really test 
it because I don't have any A4 paper.

Maybe there's a way to get man(1) to send different options to groff 
than -t, but I don't know it.

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA