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Date:      Fri, 20 Mar 1998 07:13:48 -0500
From:      MALCOLM BOFF <Malcolm_Boff@compuserve.com>
To:        freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   man pages
Message-ID:  <199803200714_MC2-3768-EB0F@compuserve.com>

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(This note refers to 2.2.2-RELEASE)
I have been trying to understand how man works in order that I can get some
properly formatted printouts and come up with the following conclusions.

assuming the command 'man man' is executed then
the following command is executed :-
  zcat /usr/share/man/cat1/man.1.gz
this file after decompression is not in *roff format

assuming that the command 'man -t man' is executed then
the following command is executed
   zcat /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz | tbl | troff
the compressed file is in *roff format

This operation by default will use the troff device 'devps' ie postscript
this does not seem to be the case however so I tried executing the command
manually as :-

zcat /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz | tbl | troff -Tascii

and expected an ascii printable but that didn't give me what I expected.

Is the command troff working correctly ? Should it be proceeded by 'groff'
?

There seems to be something not quite right here or is my understanding
incorrect ?

Malcolm G. Boff
Sylmex Ltd.

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