On Wednesday 22 October 2008 10:38:40 pm Polytropon wrote: > Hi! > > On Wed, 22 Oct 2008 21:56:20 -0200, Gonzalo Nemmi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Is there an easy way to get man to format the man page using plain good > > ISO 216 standard A4 page size? > > My suggfestion for an attempt would be to first strip any control > characters from the output of "man -P cat <entry>" and then pipe > it to an ASCII to PDF converter (a2ps, if I remember correctly); > this would remove any markups, I know, but would lead to a PDF > output using the system's default paper size, A4 (I hope). > > I know this is not the best idea, but it should be accomplishable > without many problems. A better idea would be to write a simple > filter that convert the man page (including formatting characters) > into LaTeX source and then run it through pdflatex.
Exactly .. you got it just the way I wanted .. after your explanantion, the question _begs_ to be asked: do we, citizens of ISO 216 adopting countries, have to walk that cumbersome path in order to get something as simple as an ISO compliant document?? Shouldn't it be the other way around??? Does an inmensily huge majority have to walk the extra mile in order to get an ISO compliant document whereas a small minority benefits from having non ISO complaint default formats??? I, for once, would pretty much like to know the logic behind that decision. > > and on a side note: will we ever get to see ISO 216 A4 as the default > > choice for output instead of not-standard, only usefull in the US but > > useless in the rest of the whole world "letter" page size and the > > likes??? > > You're getting my thoughts, man. :-) I'd like to see this happen, > too, but I don't think the developers of FreeBSD and all the fine > applications will say goodbye to their Letter, Legal, Exec etc. > paper formats. A4 isn't a DIN standard anymore, its ISO for many > years now, and unlike Letter, it has the ability to be scaled > (to half size, to quarter size, to double size) easily. Today, > the manual replacement of many different settings is needed to > get a system A4 compliant. > > Greetings from Germany, where A4 is the standard for more than > a century now. =^_^= I really hope they do, or at least, start contemplating the fact that ISO standards are usefull as a whole or are not usefull at all .. Gretings from Argentina, where A4 is the standard from 1943. And yes .. so are the metric system, kilograms, litres, etc :) Sincere regards -- Blessings Gonzalo Nemmi _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
