man peculiarities

[Kerne Fahey <kmfahey@toast.net>]

I've a few minor problems with man.

To start with, I'm using SVGATextMode. My screen is set to 116x60. However,
whenever I view a man page with man, it reformats the page to 80 columns wide,
and justifies it.

I'm using slink, with most of the core upgraded to potato. When I was in
Redhat before (LinuxPPC R5), man would always reformat the pages to the
appropriate width-- even in xterms of various sizes.

I've upgraded man to the latest version (a short walk), but it still reformats
to 80 columns. Where is this setting and how do I change it?

I've tried to add the .ll and .pl lines to /usr/share/groff/tmac/man.local,
and it works-- though it makes viewing man pages in X difficult--, but I then
end up with a screenful of empty space before each man page.

This is, I think, because of the page breaks (???) that man inserts into the
manpages, including a footer containing the date, the version of man and the
page number, and a header containing the manpage reference and its proper
name. (Since I'm viewing the pages onscreen, these page breaks are thoroughly
unnecessary.) These page breaks do have a tendency to create a whole new page
composed of one or two widowed lines. (Looking at the header&footer, I'm
reminded of the ones that pr inserts by default into files it's processing.)

How do I make it so that man no longer inserts these headers & footers?



Served with a smile,
-- 
Kerne