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):
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.xhtmlIt 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 --stdinRead more about this topic: Man Page
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