Re: How to test a manpage? ‘nroff -man | less’ does not display like ‘man’.
Hi Charles,
On Wednesday 14 July 2010 06:50:57 Charles Plessy wrote:
> 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,
I don't know if this would help you, but the canonical (lintian) way to
check that everything is OK is like this:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8 MANWIDTH=80 man --warnings -E UTF-8 -l <file> >/dev/null
You might want to pipe it through |less or something to check for visual
artifacts.
from:
http://lintian.debian.org/tags/manpage-has-errors-from-man.html
Cheers.
--
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo@gmail.com>
Reply to: