Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ark1!dtix!jsdy
From: jsdy@dtix.dt.navy.mil (Joseph S. D. Yao)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: Filler lines
Summary: This is how to print.
Message-ID: <756@dtix.dt.navy.mil>
Date: 14 Sep 89 15:38:09 GMT
References: <21376@paris.ics.uci.edu> <460@nixpbe.UUCP> <13871@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <14600@bfmny0.UUCP> <3017@dell.dell.com>
Reply-To: jsdy@dtix.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao)
Organization: Hadron, Inc.
Lines: 62

In article <3017@dell.dell.com> mikeh@dell.UUCP (Mike Hammel, ) writes:
>					  ...  Is there a way to print the
>man page off?

On a typical machine, manual entries* are stored under directory
/usr/man/.  If you have an old Unix(R) system or a modern BSD-ische
system, manual entries will be stored under /usr/man/manX/topic.Xxxx,
where X is the section of the original Unix manual, "topic" is the
topic (program, subr, or whatever), and xxx is whatever somebody
thought would be cute as a subsection of the Unix manual section.  On
System III - System V-based systems, these entries are stored under
/usr/man/?_man/manX/topic.Xxxx, where ? is one of 'u' (Users' Manual),
'p' (Programmers' Manual), or 'a' (Administrators' Manual).

Manual entries are stored in these places in nroff/troff format.  This
is a text processor format in which formatting commands are inserted in
lines before what they are to affect.  It is universal to Unix machines
(except where vendors try to milk you for more money).  The 'man'
command typically calls 'nroff -man {filename}' to generate the text
that you see.  You can do the same, piping it to your print command
(lp, lpr, or whatever):
	nroff -man {filename} | {print command}
BUT ...

There's a short-cut that 'man' uses on most recent (since 1980 or so)
systems.  The already-formatted copies are stored in separate direct-
ories.  On BSD-ische machines, this is /usr/man/catX.  On System III++,
it is /usr/catman/?_man/manX.  Since the text formatting programs take
a lot of real and CPU time to run, you might check whether the manual
entry already exists in formatted form, and then print that file
directly.

Word of warning: the formatted form may contain some odd control codes
that are supposed to do clever things on specific types of printers.
Check with your system administrator whether there is a specific device
type name you need to give to 'nroff', or (better yet) whether your
printer should be run with 'troff' (or the shells that call 'troff',
such as 'xroff', 'psroff', etc.) to get truly typeset-quality output.
If not, then you should print a couple of shorter manual entries - or
even find whether there are still any manual "pages" to print - and
check them for odd happenings before printing the formatter output.  If
there's anything with which you can't live, you'll have to copy the
file into your home directory, and edit it to remove control codes (and
make sure all pages are then the length of your printer page -
typically 66 lines) before printing it.

Have fun.  But in moderation.  I lost my first Unix account and some of
the system staff's trust when I printed out the entire Unix manual at
the end of the semester.  (But, then, that was only Version 5 or 6 -
and you could do that with much less paper.)

Joe Yao
Hadron, Inc.
courtesy David Taylor Research Center

* They're much longer than a page, typically; why call them manual
  pages?

(R) Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratories.

PS Sorry about the length ... you wonder why I don't respond so much
   any more?