man pages in plain text - how to?

[Alex Zbyslaw]

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