Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen. - Robert Bresson
Frank Carver
Sheriff
Joined: Jan 07, 1999
Posts: 6913
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This is one of those no-so-frequently-asked questions. As I'm sure you you would find, Michael, if you tried this, you either lose the formatting, mess up the output, or get a whole bundle of _^H in an attempt to underline stuff. Anyway, the classic solution is
Alternatively there are various converters to turn manpages into HTML pages, for example you could use man2html or there are hypertext interfaces to manpages such as this one or that one. My point being that once you've made them available as HTML pages it makes them very easy to print from any bogstandard windoze PC or macintosh assuming you have one available. A google search should yield more web-based manpages. HTH.
Originally posted by Frank Carver: This is one of those no-so-frequently-asked questions. As I'm sure you you would find, Michael, if you tried this, you either lose the formatting, mess up the output, or get a whole bundle of _^H in an attempt to underline stuff. Anyway, the classic solution is
see
for more details.
Must be a Linux thing; I have no issues actually using this technique all the time on Solaris. I do remember running unix2dos against output to a file, but since I rarely want a file of a man page I don't think too much of the ^M's in the file.
Frank Carver
Sheriff
Joined: Jan 07, 1999
Posts: 6913
posted
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It's not just the ^M, honest. By default, the output of "man" attempts to do underlining by emitting a character, a backspace and an underbar for each underlined character. The purpose of "col -b" is to process these sequences into acceptable printable output. I'm sure it was the same on Solaris last time I looked ( I haven't got access to a Solaris machine right now, or I would try it ).
Historically man boldfaced critical headings by backspacing and overprinting (something that works a lot easier on a teletype terminal than a laser printer). Which is why the extra voodoo. Some printers will honor the backspace (though not so frequently will it overprint into boldface), but for the rest, you want that magic or you get ugliness.
One of the most odious afflictions that Business has inflicted on the modern English language is "pro-active". Most of the time it's simply redundantly used in place of the simple old word "active". And a good deal of the rest of the time it means "You're not overworked enough yet, so go out and find more!"
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