How to test a manpage? ‘nroff -man | less’ does not display like ‘man’.

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Dear all,

before updating a package, I wanted to look at the new upstream manpage, but
realised that ‘nroff -man’ does not produce the same output as ‘man’ itself.
Let's take the example of samtools(1) from the samtools package.

With ‘man samtools’, users can see tables like the following one in the section
‘SAM FORMAT’.

          ┌────┬───────┬──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
          │Col │ Field │                       Description                        │
          ├────┼───────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
          │ 1  │ QNAME │ Query (pair) NAME                                        │
          │ 2  │ FLAG  │ bitwise FLAG                                             │
          │ 3  │ RNAME │ Reference sequence NAME                                  │
(…)

But with ‘zcat /usr/share/man/man1/samtools.1.gz | nroff -man | less’, here is what
I get. 

       center  box;  cb  |  cb  | cb n | l | l .  Col  Field     Description _
       1    QNAME     Query     (pair)     NAME     2    FLAG bitwise     FLAG
       3    RNAME     Reference sequence NAME 4    POS  1-based leftmost POSi‐


The workaround I found was to copy the new manpage in /tmp/man/man1, and call
‘man -M /tmp/man samtools’. Does anybody know how a more convenient to display a
manpage the same way as users will get it by using ‘man’ ?

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles