Re: man -t problem

[Zane Dodson <zdodson@zdodson.com>]

Hello,

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 05:54:10PM +0000, Olafur Jens Sigurdsson wrote:
| ?ann 2006-06-25, 20:17:09 (+0200) skrifa?i Jan Willem Stumpel:
| > When I want to print a man page, I usually do
| > 
| > man -t command | lpr
| > 
| > The -t option with man formats the page neatly as Postscript.
| > But recently I found that instead of the expected man page,
| > gibberish is printed (which looks vaguely like Postscript _source_
| > text).
| > 
| > When I do "man -t command > test.ps", then "file test.ps", I get
| > the answer "test.ps: awk script text" (instead of the expected
| > "Postscript document text"). To make test.ps printable I first
| > have to run it through ps2ps or ps2pdf.
| > 
| > Did others see this also? Is it a bug, or some new kind of "feature"?
| 
| This works fine on my machine, debin unstable with man version 2.4.3,
| 2005-07-03.

Same here (for an earlier version of man).

Could you post the exact command you were trying to look up with man?
The output from
  % man -t ... | od -c | head
might be helpful.  Here is the output for the ls(1) manual page on my
machine.

  eta [543] $ man --version
  man, version 2.4.2, 2003-09-20

  eta [544] $ man -t ls | od -c | head -4
  0000000   %   !   P   S   -   A   d   o   b   e   -   3   .   0  \n   %
  0000020   %   C   r   e   a   t   o   r   :       g   r   o   f   f
  0000040   v   e   r   s   i   o   n       1   .   1   8   .   1  \n   %
  0000060   %   C   r   e   a   t   i   o   n   D   a   t   e   :       M

  eta [545] $ man -t ls > /tmp/ls.1.ps

  eta [546] $ file /tmp/ls.1.ps
  /tmp/ls.1.ps: PostScript document text conforming at level 3.0

FWIW, you could try running groff explicitly to format the manual page.

  % man -w ls # locate man page for ls
  % zcat /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.gz | groff -man -Tps > /tmp/ls.1.ps

Hope that helps.

Best regards,

-- 
Zane Dodson
ZDodson Consulting, Inc.