man -t odd page size

[Ian Smith]

On Thu, 23 Oct 2008, Polytropon wrote:
 > On Thu, 23 Oct 2008 19:37:56 +1100 (EST), Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au> wrote:
 > > Polytropon: thanks for pdfman script - but does 'pdfman ipfw' work for 
 > > you?  Here the 'overprinting' is misaligned in gv, while others are ok.
 > 
 > Yes, but it outputs an error message:
 > 
 > 	<standard input>:2620: warning [p 25, 6.2i]: cannot adjust line
 > 
 > The PDF file is 26 pages long. Maybe another PDF viewer will work
 > better (xpdf)?

Modified to rm any /tmp/man.pdf first, then tried both xpdf and kpdf .. 
still the same problem.  Here's a small (if messy) text clip from xpdf; 
all the underlining and overprinting stuff gets scrambled, plus some 
missing newlines later in the file ..

N A ME
 N AM E
   ip fw -- IP firewall and traffic shaper control program
     pf w
S YN OP SI S
 SY NO PS I S
   ip fw [- c q] a dd _ u_ e
     pf w - cq ad d r_ l_

However this time I noticed an error listed also, different to yours, 
maybe because mine is only 20 pages (this on 5.5-STABLE if it matters)

sola% pdfman ipfw
(source:.gz: No such file or directory
/usr/share/man/man8/ipfw.8.gz).gz: No such file or directory

Which is strange, and goes away if I redirect the first command's stderr 
to /dev/null, but it doesn't change the output.  The groff output looks 
ok, not that I read postscript beyond seeing head and tail look intact.

zcat `man -w $@` 2>/dev/null | groff -Tps -dpaper=a4 -P-pa4 -mandoc \
 | ps2pdf - /tmp/man.pdf && gv /tmp/man.pdf

Seems that short (or maybe just 'some') mans work very well, but longer 
ones, (or just 'some others'?) have problems here, eg:

sola% pdfman ip		# looks great, 5pp
sola% pdfman ipfw	# overprinting misaligned as above, 20pp
sola% pdfman csh	# pretty rough and misaligned also, 48pp
<standard input>:1798: normal or special character expected (got a tab character)
<standard input>:1798: normal or special character expected (got a space)
<standard input>:1798: normal or special character expected (got a space)
<standard input>:1798: normal or special character expected (got a space)
<standard input>:1800: a backspace character is not allowed in an escape name
<standard input>:1801: a backspace character is not allowed in an escape name
<standard input>:1804: warning: numeric expression expected (got `v')
sola%

Possibly just my out of date ports (don't ask), quite likely ps2pdf?

 > > Well, a quarter of the people on this planet live in China, so by your 
 > > theory shouldn't the FreeBSD lists, docs and code all be in Chinese?
 > 
 > Let me follow this Micky Mouse Logic. :-) Because the computer has
 > been invented by a German, all computer stuff should be in the
 > german language. And now all the Americans can feel how the average
 > german computer user feels today: scared by all the things he doesn't
 > understand. :-)

Charlie Babbage was German?  Learn something every day on this list :)

 > > What actually works and is adopted in the real world determines that.
 > 
 > Nota bene:
 > 
 > The worst solution always prevails.

But much sooner than the best, which takes forever.

 > People want cheap, they get cheap.

We wanted free, we got free .. and don't have to shell out maybe $10k+ 
for a shelf full of CCITT / ISO docs!

 > > Ask yourself: how come the world uses TCP/IP for internet communications 
 > > rather than the OSI X.200-X.219 suite?  How come we're still using SMTP 
 > > plus a pile of RFCs to deliver email rather than the X.400-X.420 suite?
 > 
 > Having worked with the AX.25 protocol (on amateur radio), sometimes
 > I tend to thing... oh what a crap is TCP/IP... :-)

Well I suppose the ITU have a TCP/IP-free X.20something net running 
somewhere, but it doesn't look like pushing TCP/IP off its perch ..

cheers, Ian