man -t odd page size

[Matt Emmerton]

> On Wednesday 22 October 2008 10:38:40 pm Polytropon wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Exactly .. you got it just the way I wanted .. after your explanantion, 
> the
> question _begs_ to be asked: do we, citizens of ISO 216 adopting 
> countries,
> have to walk that cumbersome path in order to get something as simple as 
> an
> ISO compliant document??
>
> Shouldn't it be the other way around???

Perhaps, but since the roots of *BSD are in the USA, letter was a sensible 
default (at the time).

Now, if a collection of FreeBSD members from ISO 216 adopting companies 
wanted to figure out a way to put "default paper size" into some kind of 
locale option that man (and other tools) could use, then that would go a 
long way towards reducing the pain.

--
Matt