What are you hoping to do with the file, and how much of the  
formatting are you trying to preserve?

So far you've been given instructions for formatted printing on a  
printer and outputting to several formats, including postscript, dvi,  
and plain text. If you are wanting something like PDF, postscript or  
dvi are what you want (man dvi2ps, man ps2pdf).

I have a really short script I wrote at work to make a compilation PDF  
of a set of man pages. I can send it to you after I get in if that  
sounds like it is what you are after.

~Ryan

On 18-Dec-08, at 6:36 AM, Iron_Man <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> I guess I used the wrong wording ... I am wanting to "print" or
> redirect the output to a text file.  Sorry about the bug in my
> wording.
>
> On Dec 17, 9:48 pm, "Chris Miller" <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 6:27 PM, Iron_Man  
>> <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> I'm hoping that there is an easy answer to this question.  I am  
>>> trying
>>> to figure out how to print out a man page for 'bc'.  My first  
>>> attempt
>>> at doing this was to use the command:
>>>     $ man bc > info.txt
>>
>>> My problem with this command is that when I opened info.txt there  
>>> were
>>> a number of formatting oddities.  Is there a way to extract the man
>>> page to a text file, while keeping the formatting true to how you
>>> would see the man page in the console?
>>
>> A quick stroll through "man man" reveals two candidates:
>>
>>        man -t alias | lpr -Pps
>>            Format  the  manual  page  referenced  by  `alias',  
>> usually
>> a shell manual page, into the
>>            default troff or groff format and pipe it to the printer
>> named ps.   The  default  output
>>            for groff is usually PostScript.  man --help should advise
>> as to which processor is bound
>>            to the -t option.
>>
>>        man -l -Tdvi ./foo.1x.gz > ./foo.1x.dvi
>>            This command will decompress and format the nroff source
>> manual page ./foo.1x.gz  into  a
>>            device independent (dvi) file.  The redirection is
>> necessary as the -T flag causes output
>>            to be directed to stdout with no pager.  The output could
>> be viewed with a  program  such
>>            as xdvi or further processed into PostScript using a
>> program such as dvips.
>>
>> Although the most likely fix is this:
>>
>>        -7, --ascii
>>               When viewing a pure ascii(7) manual page on a 7 bit
>> terminal  or  terminal  emulator,
>>               some  characters may not display correctly when using
>> the latin1(7) device description
>>               with GNU nroff.  This option allows pure ascii manual
>> pages to be displayed  in  ascii
>>               with  the  latin1 device.  It will not translate any
>> latin1 text.  The following table
>>               shows the translations performed: some parts of it may
>> only be displayed properly when
>>               using GNU nroff's latin1(7) device.
>>
>>               Description           Octal   latin1   ascii
>>               ---------------------------------------------
>>               continuation hyphen    255      -        -
>>               bullet (middle dot)    267      o        o
>>               acute accent           264      '        '
>>               multiplication sign    327      x        x
>>
>>               If  the latin1 column displays correctly, your terminal
>> may be set up for latin1 char-
>>               acters and this option is not necessary.  If the latin1
>> and ascii columns are  identi-
>>               cal, you are reading this page using this option or man
>> did not format this page using
>>               the latin1 device description.  If the latin1 column is
>> missing or  corrupt,  you  may
>>               need to view manual pages with this option.
>>
>>               This  option  is  ignored  when using options -t, -H,
>> -T, or -Z and may be useless for
>>               nroff other than GNU's.
>>
>> --
>> Registered Linux Addict #431495http://profile.xfire.com/ 
>> mrstalinman| John 3:16!http://www.fsdev.net/|http://lordsauron.wordpress.com/
>> Parents, Take Responsibility For Your Kids!http://www.whattheyplay.com/
> >

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