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. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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