Re: alternative man page reader?

[Bradley Bell <bradleyb@u.washington.edu>]

On Sat, 15 May 1999, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> Othmar Pasteka <pasteka@kabsi.at>:
> > Actually you can make some text output with groff, for instance:
> > groff -man -Tascii pon.1 > pon.txt
> 
> Yes, of course. The point raised earlier by this thread is that groff
> takes lots of space. The programs I pointed at of pretty much minimal
> size.

Could the minimum files neccessary to execute the above functionality be
split out from groff?  We don't need all those fonts and tmac's and those
utility programs, and who knows what else, just to read man pages.
And the man command could be implemented with just a shell script, no
caching or anything like that.

Here, for example, is a teeny tiny little nroff that does a good job
reading most, but not all man pages:
ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/text/nroffsrc.tar.Z

-Brad