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From: charlie@milton.acs.washington.edu (Charles Geyer)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.wanted
Subject: Re: How do you print a man page???
Message-ID: <1732@milton.acs.washington.edu>
Date: 4 Feb 90 20:06:13 GMT
References: <338@ntpdvp1.UUCP> <5450004@hpfcdc.HP.COM>
Reply-To: charlie@stat.washington.edu (Charlie Geyer)
Organization: UW Statistics, Seattle
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In article <5450004@hpfcdc.HP.COM> randyc@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Randy Campbell) writes:

> Most UN*X manpages use nroff with macros defined in an "an" macro package,
> (hence nroff -man).
>
> If your system lacks a man command it may well lack the macros...

  % man 7 man

should describe the macros if they are there.

> If you have the macro package, "nroff -man 'file_name' | more | lp" 
> will give you pretty troff-like output (your printer must be set to
> 66 lines per page or page breaks may be in the wrong place).

Yes, and

  troff -man file

will give actual troff output (or ptroff, or psroff, or whatever roff) that
looks exactly like the manual.

Note that the file is the *roff file for the actual man page, for example
to print the man page for ls do

  % whereis ls
  ls: /bin/ls /usr/man/man1/ls.1
  % troff -man /usr/man/man1/ls.1