From owner-freebsd-questions Tue May 4 6:43:52 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com [24.2.89.207]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B2492154C4 for ; Tue, 4 May 1999 06:43:50 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cjc@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com) Received: (from cjc@localhost) by cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com (8.9.3/8.8.8) id JAA03306; Tue, 4 May 1999 09:43:50 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from cjc) From: "Crist J. Clark" Message-Id: <199905041343.JAA03306@cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com> Subject: Re: Printing Manpages In-Reply-To: <19990504165135.X10134@freebie.lemis.com> from Greg Lehey at "May 4, 99 04:51:35 pm" To: grog@lemis.com (Greg Lehey) Date: Tue, 4 May 1999 09:43:50 -0400 (EDT) Cc: norbert.meissner@daimlerchrysler.com, cjclark@home.com, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Reply-To: cjclark@home.com X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL40 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Greg Lehey wrote, > [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. Another problem is that I don't and will not have a2ps installed on my system. IIRC, I tried to install a2ps once and had some trouble when my HDD got to about 108% full. My FreeBSD systems at work aren't living on high end machines or share space with M$'s disk hogs. Using enscript with headers turned off will do for now. Thanks for the suggestions everyone. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@home.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message