Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
Hi, Stephen Gregoratto wrote on Sat, Feb 09, 2019 at 10:41:17AM +1100: > In my opinion I find the PostScript/PDF output from groff to be > better than mandoc's, sorry Ingo :(. Absolutely, that is exactly what i always say. > The font size and line spacing makes a better print, which makes > sense considering that groff is a typesetting suite. There are lots of aspects in which groff(1) PostScript and PDF output - i.e., output from a real typesetting system - is better than mandoc(1)'s. > The catch is that groff doesn't detect if eqn(1) or tbl(1) needs > to be run for the man page, while mandoc does. Yes. One goal of mandoc(1) -T ps/pdf is to make calling it easy, without having to worry about *any* options, such that it can be used casually (safely and reliably) to get a quick printout. > You would need to use grog(1) for that. I strongly advise against using grog(1). It is a disgusting kludge written by an extremely careless programmer (Bernd Warken). Since Bernd is no longer able to do any programming at all AFAIK, it is now also effectively unmaintained and subject to bitrot on top of the poor quality it has in the first place. At one point, i considered simply deleting grog(1) from the OpenBSD textproc/groff package - but then again, OpenBSD packages should not be prejudiced, and since grog(1) is still distributed upstream, it is still contained in the groff package. But that doesn't mean anyone should run it. If you want to use groff, use options like "-k", "-e" or "-t" to the groff(1) program as needed or construct pipelines the traditional way. Even that is clearly more fragile and riskier with untrusted input than running mandoc, but not quite as bad as grog(1). > Here are some example pdf's for the 6.4 version of man(1): > https://www.sgregoratto.me/paste/man-groff.1.pdf > https://www.sgregoratto.me/paste/man-mandoc.1.pdf > It's up to you to decide which one looks better. It is not just a matter of personal taste. The groff(1) output is objectively better. For example, these two URIs show that mandoc fails to do adjustment (look at the right margin in the ENVIRONMENT section) and fails to use constant-width font where it should (look at the displays in the EXAMPLES section). All the same, it is convenient for just getting a quick printout. Yours, Ingo
Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
In my opinion I find the PostScript/PDF output from groff to be better than mandoc's, sorry Ingo :(. The font size and line spacing makes a better print, which makes sense considering that groff is a typesetting suite. The catch is that groff doesn't detect if eqn(1) or tbl(1) needs to be run for the man page, while mandoc does. You would need to use grog(1) for that. Here are some example pdf's for the 6.4 version of man(1): https://www.sgregoratto.me/paste/man-groff.1.pdf $ groff -mandoc -T pdf /usr/share/man/man1/man.1 alternatively... $ grog -T pdf --run /usr/share/man/man1/man.1 https://www.sgregoratto.me/paste/man-mandoc.1.pdf $ mandoc -T pdf /usr/share/man/man1/man.1 alternatively... $ man -T pdf 1 man You should replace 'pdf' with 'ps' if you are using a PostScript printer. It's up to you to decide which one looks better. -- Stephen Gregoratto
Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
Hi Beto, Beto wrote on Fri, Feb 08, 2019 at 07:45:50AM -0500: > man man | col -b > man.txt This is bad advice in the present context. Look at the Subject: line. Anne asked for "nicely formatted" printing. Your solution would be adequate if the question has been about "minimally formatted", though; but it is locale-dependent. The above command generates UTF-8 output if LC_CTYPE is set to UTF-8 and ASCII output otherwise. So whatever facility is then used for printing needs to take the encoding into account, whereas the solutions with -T ps shown earlier always work in the same way, ignoring the locale. Yours, Ingo
Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
Hi try man man | col -b > man.txt br El jue., 7 de feb. de 2019 a la(s) 11:03, Anne Wainwright ( anothera...@fables.co.za) escribió: > On Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 09:29:39AM +0200, Anne Wainwright wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I can print out nicely formatted man pages in linux, thus: > > > > $ man -t ls | lpr -P hp_laserjet > > > > But find that the -t option is not present in bsd. > > > > Have really dug around but can find no hints, where should I be looking? > > > > thanks in advance > > Ian > > > Thankyou, Sijmen & Ingo, > > I have now got well-formatted pages chugging out from the printer. > > I did use the example at the end of the mandoc man which outputs .ps > files. But I did not succeed in persuading lp to print them. Thus: > > $ lp lpadmin.ps > lp: no file in print request > > so not sure what the issue is there, but what I have is what I need. > > best > Ian > >
Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
www.dqindia.com/importance-patents-iot-enabled-devices/ Rajneesh N. Shetty On Thu, 7/2/19, Peter N. M. Hansteen wrote: Subject: Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages? To: misc@openbsd.org Received: Thursday, 7 February, 2019, 8:26 PM On Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 09:29:39AM +0200, Anne Wainwright wrote: > I can print out nicely formatted man pages in linux, thus: > > $ man -t ls | lpr -P hp_laserjet > > But find that the -t option is not present in bsd. > > Have really dug around but can find no hints, where should I be looking? I would say what you are probably looking for is mandoc (man mandoc or http://man.openbsd.org/mandoc), which supports a variety of output formats. - Peter -- Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.bsdly.net/ http://www.nuug.no/ "Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic" delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds. -Inline Attachment Follows-
Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
Hi, Sijmen J. Mulder wrote on Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 05:41:57PM +0100: > Op do feb 7 2019, om 14:33 schreef Ingo Schwarze: >> But please, if you can, always provide complete, working, tested >> command invocations to users, in this case: > Apologies - I was on mobile which but that's no excuse. No need to apologize - a timely and correct answer is of course better than no answer. I didn't intend to discourage that. :) Yours, Ingo
Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
Op do feb 7 2019, om 14:33 schreef Ingo Schwarze: > But please, if you can, always provide complete, working, tested > command invocations to users, in this case: Apologies - I was on mobile which but that's no excuse.
Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
Hi Anne, Anne Wainwright wrote on Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 05:54:04PM +0200: > I have now got well-formatted pages chugging out from the printer. Good. :-) > I did use the example at the end of the mandoc man which outputs .ps > files. But I did not succeed in persuading lp to print them. Thus: > > $ lp lpadmin.ps > lp: no file in print request > > so not sure what the issue is there, but what I have is what I need. A command called "lp" simply doesn't exist in the OpenBSD base system: $ man lp man: No entry for lp in the manual. $ which lp which: lp: Command not found. Just use lpr(1) = /usr/bin/lpr. $ pkglocate bin/lp | grep 'lp$' cups-2.2.10p0:print/cups,-main:/usr/local/bin/lp I'd advise against using cups when you can avoid it. It is a behemoth that is extremely poorly designed, and the documentation of cups is of terrible quality. You are no doubt in for no end of surprises if you attempt to use cups. Admittedly, with some low-quality printers, using it may look like an easy workaround for other problems. But if your printer understands PostScript, you should be just fine without cups. Yours, Ingo
Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
Hi Peter, Peter N. M. Hansteen wrote on Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 10:26:03AM +0100: > On Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 09:29:39AM +0200, Anne Wainwright wrote: >> I can print out nicely formatted man pages in linux, thus: >> >> $ man -t ls | lpr -P hp_laserjet >> >> But find that the -t option is not present in bsd. >> >> Have really dug around but can find no hints, where should I be looking? > I would say what you are probably looking for is mandoc (man mandoc or > http://man.openbsd.org/mandoc), which supports a variety of output formats. That answer is mostly correct in so far as the mandoc(1) manual page indeed documents the -T option and PostScript output mode, but it is also slightly misleading for the following reason: If there is anything you can do with apropos(1), whatis(1), or mandoc(1), then you can do exactly the same thing with man(1): apropos ... == man -k ... whatis ... == man -f ... mandoc ... == man -lc ... where "..." stands for additional options and arguments. So "mandoc" no longer has significance as a separate program with distinct options and/or functionality: it is just the same program as man(1), except for having -l and -c active by default. Of course the name "mandoc" is still significant for the (portable) software package implementing man(1), apropos(1), whatis(1), help(1), mandoc(1), makewhatis(8), and man.cgi(8) in OpenBSD style. Yours, Ingo
Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
Hi, Sijmen J. Mulder wrote on Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 09:50:47AM +0100: > Op 7 feb. 2019 om 08:29 heeft Anne Wainwright het volgende geschreven: >> I can print out nicely formatted man pages in linux, thus: >> >> $ man -t ls | lpr -P hp_laserjet >> >> But find that the -t option is not present in bsd. >> >> Have really dug around but can find no hints, where should I be looking? > man supports mandoc's -T option, e.g.: > > man -T ps | ... That is the correct answer. But please, if you can, always provide complete, working, tested command invocations to users, in this case: $ man -T ps ls > ls.ps to generate a PostScript file on disk or $ man -T ps ls | lpr to directly send the same PostScript code to the default printer. That practice helps to avoid misunderstandings and to promote good idioms. > There's a little note about it at the end of the option list in > man's man page. See mandoc's man page for the formats and such. Exactly. The reason for doing it like that was to keep the man(1) manual page simple because new users have to read that quite early when they are not yet experienced. It would be of dubious benefit to put lots of rarely-used non-standard options into the man(1) manual. Besides, duplicate information is also a problem - both for maintenance and because it forces readers to scan and compare two (identical? similar? or subtly different?) versions. As to why we have mo -t option, see http://mandoc.bsd.lv/man/man.options.1.html http://mandoc.bsd.lv/man/man.options.1.html#t Even though it is similar to -T ps in most man(1) implementations, it has ambiguous meanings in the wider program family, in particular: - preprocess with tbl(7) in groff - test = check manual pages in the hierarchy with mandb - test = check files for problems related to mandoc.db(5) in makewhatis So i decided it is best to not implement an alias -t, also because every alias makes the documentation longer, and it is best to get used to the -T ps option which needs to be supported anyway. Yours, Ingo
Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
On Thu, Feb 07, 2019 at 09:29:39AM +0200, Anne Wainwright wrote: > I can print out nicely formatted man pages in linux, thus: > > $ man -t ls | lpr -P hp_laserjet > > But find that the -t option is not present in bsd. > > Have really dug around but can find no hints, where should I be looking? I would say what you are probably looking for is mandoc (man mandoc or http://man.openbsd.org/mandoc), which supports a variety of output formats. - Peter -- Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.bsdly.net/ http://www.nuug.no/ "Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic" delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.
Re: How to print nicely formatted man pages?
> Op 7 feb. 2019 om 08:29 heeft Anne Wainwright het > volgende geschreven: > > I can print out nicely formatted man pages in linux, thus: > > $ man -t ls | lpr -P hp_laserjet > > But find that the -t option is not present in bsd. > > Have really dug around but can find no hints, where should I be looking? man supports mandoc’s -T option, e.g.: man -T ps | ... There’s a little note about it at the end of the option list in man’s man page. See mandoc’s man page for the formats and such. Cheers, Sijmen
