[Novalug] Printing man pages question

[Jon LaBadie]

On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 08:07:37PM -0500, James Ewing Cottrell 3rd wrote:
>   On 11/20/2010 2:14 AM, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 11:21:53PM -0500, cmhowe at patriot.net wrote:
> >> List,
> >>
> >> I want to have a hard copy of a man page. If, for example, I do
> >>
> >>    man gedit>gedit-manual
> >>
> >> then
> >>
> >>    lpr gedit-manual
> >>
> >> I get something so unattractive that it is useless. I could edit it but I
> >> have a hunch that there is a program to make it attractive. Does anyone
> >> know of a program that does that?
> > According to the man manpage, the -t option should do what you want.
> >
> >     man -t gedit>  gedit.ps
> >     lp gedit.ps
> >
> >     man -t gedit | lp
> >
> > Jon
> You are probably right. But I always use "a2ps" to send things to the 
> printer:
> 
> man whatever | a2ps -m
> 
> The -m option processes the data like a manpage. You can also use -2 to 
> get two column output in landscape mode
> and -s2 to get double sided printing.
> 

The distinction is in the original formatting.  Using ancient program
equivalents, "man whatever" does "nroff -man" while "man -t whatever"
does "troff -man".  I.e. ASCII text formatted vs. typesetter formatted.
The initial formatting has the potential to be prettier/fancier with
the troff typesetting.

The output of "man whatever" is simple text, viewable with cat, more,
etc. and probably could be sent directly to a 6 line per inch printer.
Or as you show, converted to postscript before printing.  In contrast,
the output of "man -t whatever" is already postscript.  To view it
on the screen would require a program like ghostview.

jon
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  novalugml at jgcomp.com
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