From owner-freebsd-questions Tue May 4 0:21:46 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from allegro.lemis.com (allegro.lemis.com [192.109.197.134]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 66AB514F9A for ; Tue, 4 May 1999 00:21:39 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@freebie.lemis.com) Received: from freebie.lemis.com (freebie.lemis.com [192.109.197.137]) by allegro.lemis.com (8.9.1/8.9.0) with ESMTP id QAA09981; Tue, 4 May 1999 16:51:37 +0930 (CST) Received: (from grog@localhost) by freebie.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.0) id QAA38963; Tue, 4 May 1999 16:51:36 +0930 (CST) Date: Tue, 4 May 1999 16:51:35 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Norbert Meissner Cc: cjclark , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Printing Manpages Message-ID: <19990504165135.X10134@freebie.lemis.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.4i In-Reply-To: ; from Meissner, Norbert on Tue, May 04, 1999 at 08:55:14AM +0200 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-41-739-7062 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html] On Tuesday, 4 May 1999 at 8:55:14 +0200, Meissner, Norbert wrote: >> On Dienstag, 4. Mai 1999 06:23, Crist J. Clark wrote: >> >> I want to print out some long manpages. I know how to convert a >> manpage to Postscript and print it quite easily, >> >>> man -t topic | lpr >> >> Where 'topic' is the page of choice. >> >> However, I'd like to print two columns on a page (two manpage pages >> per page of paper). I know of a kind of ugly work around, >> >>> gunzip -c /usr/share/man/man1/topic.1.gz | groff -man -Tascii | enscript -2r >> >> But that is an ugly command line and the output is not too pretty >> either (it works, but unless enscript gets some tweaking, page breaks >> and other things are off). >> >> Anyone have a better way to convert manpages to a pretty two column >> per page form? Perhaps piping through gs somehow (the word 'column' is >> not even on 'man gs' so I don't know where to start there)? Or maybe >> enscript is the right tool with some different options? > > have a look at a2ps (a4 or letter size, what you prefer) at the ports. it > just does what you want, especially for man pages. if you haven't any > ps-printer you should also have a look at ghostscript. The problem with this solution is that it's not troff, it's nroff, and it *still* needs PostScript. The correct solution (some assembly required) is to massage the PostScript to print left and right. I do something similar for proofs of "The Complete FreeBSD", where I print four thumbnails on a page, but it would take a lot of work to change that to two per page, which is why I didn't answer before. Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message