Re: paper size not honored by man -t command
On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 11:31:45AM +0800, Ridzwan Abdullah wrote:
> I have just installed a Debian 3.0 system and have discovered a
> perculiar thing. Whenever I print a manual page using the 'man -t
> subject | lpr' command I always get a printout fomatted for a US
> letter sized page although my /etc/papersize setting is set to A4
> and my printcap also specifies A4 size paper. During installation,
> I have always consistently specified A4 size whenever applicable
> and at no time specified US-Letter size. Does troff (used by the -t
> option) defaults to US-Letter or is there any other configuration
> files that I have missed?
troff in Debian 3.0 should honour /etc/papersize. If you have gs
installed, try 'man -t <subject> | gs -sDEVICE=bbox -'. For A4, the last
two numbers on the BoundingBox lines should be close to 540 and 800; for
Letter they should be close to 540 and 750.
If that test passes, then you should probably look at your printing
configuration.
> BTW, I am using a postscript printer and use LPRng and apsfilter on
> my system. Although the manual page for lpr states that the -t
> option is obsoleted, I find its the only way I can get a nicely
> formatted printout of a man page - other methods results in a badly
> formatted one using the awful fixed courier font.
The -t option to lpr has pretty much nothing to do with the -t option to
man. The former specifies what lpr takes as input, while the latter
makes man call groff in a different way. The -t option to man isn't
obsolete.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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