Re: [Groff] Unix Man Pages

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi John,

> Suppose I had a list of pathnames to a system's man pages (like
> /usr/lib/perl5/man/man3/POSIX.3.gz, /usr/man/man3/mitem_visible.3x,
> etc.) What would be a good cross *nix way to convert them to ascii?

man(1) kicks off nroff(1) or troff(1), or something similiar, to convert
the troff source to the desired output format.

> I've found that even % man /usr/man/man3/mitem_visible.3x doesn't work
> on freebsd, for example: it wants % man 3x mitem_visible but this
> could be ambiguous about which man page to output.
> 
> Any tips on how to approach this in a *nix-independent manner (while
> still retaining man page formatting) are most welcome. Thanks in
> advance for any tips or leads.

Cross-Unix, therefore not recent groff-specific, I'd go for

    nroff -Tdumb -man /path/to/manpagefile.1 | col -b

You might find some man pages want tbl(1) used, but the idea's the same.

If that doesn't work somewhere, let us know.

Cheers,


Ralph.