From owner-freebsd-questions Tue May 4 3: 9:14 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from allegro.lemis.com (allegro.lemis.com [192.109.197.134]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 17C6A14CCA for ; Tue, 4 May 1999 03:09:09 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from grog@freebie.lemis.com) Received: from freebie.lemis.com (freebie.lemis.com [192.109.197.137]) by allegro.lemis.com (8.9.1/8.9.0) with ESMTP id TAA10620; Tue, 4 May 1999 19:39:07 +0930 (CST) Received: (from grog@localhost) by freebie.lemis.com (8.9.3/8.9.0) id TAA48172; Tue, 4 May 1999 19:39:06 +0930 (CST) Date: Tue, 4 May 1999 19:39:06 +0930 From: Greg Lehey To: Norbert Meissner Cc: cjclark , freebsd-questions Subject: Re: Printing Manpages Message-ID: <19990504193906.E40359@freebie.lemis.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.4i In-Reply-To: ; from Meissner, Norbert on Tue, May 04, 1999 at 11:57:52AM +0200 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-41-739-7062 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG [Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html] On Tuesday, 4 May 1999 at 11:57:52 +0200, Meissner, Norbert wrote: > On Dienstag, 4. Mai 1999 09:22, Greg Lehey wrote: >> >> [Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html] >> >> On Tuesday, 4 May 1999 at 8:55:14 +0200, Meissner, Norbert wrote: >>>> On Dienstag, 4. Mai 1999 06:23, Crist J. Clark wrote: >>>> >>>> I want to print out some long manpages. I know how to convert a >>>> manpage to Postscript and print it quite easily, >>>> >>>>> man -t topic | lpr >>>> >>>> Where 'topic' is the page of choice. >>>> >>>> However, I'd like to print two columns on a page (two manpage pages >>>> per page of paper). I know of a kind of ugly work around, >>>> >>>>> gunzip -c /usr/share/man/man1/topic.1.gz | groff -man -Tascii | enscript -2r >>>> >>>> But that is an ugly command line and the output is not too pretty >>>> either (it works, but unless enscript gets some tweaking, page breaks >>>> and other things are off). >>>> >>>> Anyone have a better way to convert manpages to a pretty two column >>>> per page form? Perhaps piping through gs somehow (the word 'column' is >>>> not even on 'man gs' so I don't know where to start there)? Or maybe >>>> enscript is the right tool with some different options? >>> >>> have a look at a2ps (a4 or letter size, what you prefer) at the >>> ports. it just does what you want, especially for man pages. if >>> you haven't any ps-printer you should also have a look at >>> ghostscript. >> >> The problem with this solution is that it's not troff, it's nroff, and >> it *still* needs PostScript. >> >> The correct solution (some assembly required) is to massage the >> PostScript to print left and right. I do something similar for proofs >> of "The Complete FreeBSD", where I print four thumbnails on a page, >> but it would take a lot of work to change that to two per page, which >> is why I didn't answer before. > > the correct solution is (if a2ps is installed) > > man topic | a2ps -2 -m | lpr -P myprinter > > [snip] > > I've done this many times and it works! You're not listening: >> The problem with this solution is that it's not troff, it's nroff, and >> it *still* needs PostScript. If you have some comment on what I said, I'd welcome it. Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message