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Re: Man page output width



pausmith@nortelnetworks.com wrote:
>Back a long time ago when I used to know roff in general, and groff in
>particular, really well (at Data General I wrote a lot of docs using
>groff, and talked to James a good bit about it), I took the tmac.an
>macros and modified them to decrease the margin on the man pages
>displayed on the TTY.
>
>It is _SO_ annoying to lose at least 10 characters of perfectly good
>space on the right of every single line, to a quite useless right hand
>margin.
>
>Unfortunately, that knowledge has passed out of my ever-shrinking set of
>useful brain cells.
>
>I see that there's an /etc/groff/man.local file which is loaded after
>the normal tmac.an (or tmac.an-old or however that works--looks
>confusing).  That seems promising.
>
>However, I've completely forgotten what magic incantation I need to put
>there to change the right-hand margin from 1 inch or whatever it
>currently is to something more reasonable...

Try the .ll request (groff(7) mentions it). Note, though, that man-db
2.3.19 [1] sets this too if the terminal width is outside the range
where it can reasonably use the standard line length, and I've never
tested which one overrides the other. If you like, you could recompile
man-db to override this differently: edit src/man.c and search for
roff_line_length.

[1] Since you have an /etc/groff/man.local, I'm assuming you're on
    testing or unstable - 2.3.19 is in unstable, and should be in
    testing in a few days.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]



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