[Novalug] Odd man -t output: who's to blame?

[Beartooth]

On Thu, 28 Feb 2008, Matthew Thompson wrote:

> In my "non-interactive top" thread, I was enlightened to the 
> power of ps.  So, I figured I'd print out the ps manpage for 
> some off-line reading.  I tried to accomplish this in the usual 
> means:
>
> man -t ps | ps2pdf - ps.manpage.pdf
>
> Unfortunately, it looks like the ps manpage might use some 
> techniques that man/groff doesn't like.
>
> If you run that command, you will get a lot of numeric overflow 
> errors and a single addition overflow, but it runs.  The 
> output, though, leaves a lot to be desired.  When you get to 
> the "STANDARD FORMAT SPECIFIERS" section, the descriptions are 
> all single lines that extend beyond the page.
>
> So, following some old man page howto, I found that this:
>
>> gunzip -c /usr/share/man/man1/ps.1.gz | gtbl | geqn | gtbl | \ 
>> groff -Tps -mandoc | ps2pdf - ps.manpage.pdf
>
> worked pretty well with only a few errors.  (The second gtbl 
> seems to help quell the errors.)
>
> So, my question is, is there a better man command to process 
> this into postscript?  Or, is this a bug I should file with 
> Fedora bugzilla...and if so, with whom?  Is this a man, groff, 
> or procps problem?

 	Errr ... duhhh ... do you have to have it on paper? Given 
the font size I have to use in a terminal, man pages don't format 
readably; but I can simply enter "man:ps" into the URL line in 
Konqueror, and it will make it very readable in the browser -- so 
much so that I keep Konqueror around just for that. (I run 
Gnome.)

 	I'd hate to use all the paper to print the browser 
display, though.
-- 
Beartooth Implacable, Curmudgeonly Codger Learning Linux
On the Internet, you can never tell who is a dog --
supposing you care -- but you can tell who has a mind.