Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 4 May 1999 16:51:35 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        Norbert Meissner <norbert.meissner@daimlerchrysler.com>
Cc:        cjclark <cjclark@home.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Printing Manpages
Message-ID:  <19990504165135.X10134@freebie.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <A991441F7BF5D111B2BB0008C7A410113D071A@sutgxs05.str.daimlerchrysler.com>; from Meissner, Norbert on Tue, May 04, 1999 at 08:55:14AM %2B0200
References:  <A991441F7BF5D111B2BB0008C7A410113D071A@sutgxs05.str.daimlerchrysler.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
[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 <cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> 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




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19990504165135.X10134>