Re: [Groff] Unix Man Pages

[Alejandro Lopez-Valencia]

At 06:00 p.m. 07/03/2003, J Robinson wrote:
> --- Alejandro Lopez-Valencia <address@hidden>
> wrote:
> > At 10:05 a.m. 07/03/2003 -0800, J Robinson wrote:
> >
> > Assuming you use groff 1.18.x, does
> >
> > $ export GROFF_NO_SGR=1
> > $ man -c 3 mitem_visible | col -b >
> > mitem_visible_3.txt
> >
> > work for you?
>
> The big problem with this approach is that 'man -c 3
> mitem_visible' could specify more than one man page
> (say, one in /usr/man and one in /usr/share). Also,
> not every man command supports the '-c' option.

Well, if you have duplicate man pages in different parts of the filesystem ...

Don't worry about the -c flag, it isn't necessary unless you actually use 
cat directories and need to regenerate the cached pages (and those are not 
created by default in most Unices out there, I just have this fixation with 
cat pages from the times of my first workstation, with a whoping 32MHz cpu, 
I would type "man ksh" and walk out to grab a cup of coffee :-)

> >
> >
> > >Any tips on how to approach this in a
> > *nix-independent
> > >manner (while still retaining man page formatting)
> > are
> > >most welcome.
> >
> > Huh!? You lost me there.
>
> I meant something that converts it to ASCII but
> retains some of it's manpage-like formatting.

Ahh! I think my proposed solution is still a good proposition, because the 
output is true ASCII without formatting codes. Write a small script that 
walks through the man directories, creates a shadowed directory structure 
and spits out plain text files.