Man Page - Converting Man Pages

Converting Man Pages

Besides viewing manual pages online (with man), man pages may also readily be converted to PDF format for immediate printing. In Mac OS X and GNU/Linux (with command replaced by the name of the desired command):

groff -mandoc command.1 >command.ps gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=command.pdf command.ps

The former command exports the manual page to PostScript format, while the latter then converts the resulting PostScript file to PDF. (The above works for both man- and mdoc-formatted manual pages.) In some cases, the hardcopy version of the manual page may be more readable if printed using a monospaced font; to do so, add the option -f C after the -mandoc option in the groff command above.

The mandoc formatter directly supports PDF among other filetypes:

mandoc -Tpdf command.1 >command.1.pdf mandoc -Tps command.1 >command.1.ps mandoc -Txhtml command.1 >command.1.xhtml

It is also possible to read pages as plain text with an external text editor by using the 'col' program with the '-b' option, with vim, with emacs-pipe, or with KWrite, part of KDE.

man sox | col -b | vim - man sox | col -b | emacs-pipe man sox | col -b | kwrite --stdin

Read more about this topic:  Man Page

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