From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Mar 20 04:14:49 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id EAA14785 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Fri, 20 Mar 1998 04:14:49 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from arl-img-6.compuserve.com (arl-img-6.compuserve.com [149.174.217.136]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id EAA14774 for ; Fri, 20 Mar 1998 04:14:47 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from Malcolm_Boff@compuserve.com) Received: (from root@localhost) by arl-img-6.compuserve.com (8.8.6/8.8.6/2.10) id HAA16080 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Fri, 20 Mar 1998 07:14:17 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 20 Mar 1998 07:13:48 -0500 From: MALCOLM BOFF Subject: man pages To: freebsd-questions Message-ID: <199803200714_MC2-3768-EB0F@compuserve.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by hub.freebsd.org id EAA14776 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG (This note refers to 2.2.2-RELEASE) I have been trying to understand how man works in order that I can get some properly formatted printouts and come up with the following conclusions. assuming the command 'man man' is executed then the following command is executed :- zcat /usr/share/man/cat1/man.1.gz this file after decompression is not in *roff format assuming that the command 'man -t man' is executed then the following command is executed zcat /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz | tbl | troff the compressed file is in *roff format This operation by default will use the troff device 'devps' ie postscript this does not seem to be the case however so I tried executing the command manually as :- zcat /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz | tbl | troff -Tascii and expected an ascii printable but that didn't give me what I expected. Is the command troff working correctly ? Should it be proceeded by 'groff' ? There seems to be something not quite right here or is my understanding incorrect ? Malcolm G. Boff Sylmex Ltd. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message