Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:39:58 +0100 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: questions@freebsd.org Cc: David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> Subject: Re: How to adjust man page line length Message-ID: <20110118203958.033c4ead.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <8162039A-6C07-4C88-928C-AAB4DD0FFCFE@hiwaay.net> References: <20110118034037.GF90952@weller-fahy.com> <8162039A-6C07-4C88-928C-AAB4DD0FFCFE@hiwaay.net>
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On Tue, 18 Jan 2011 06:48:13 -0600, David Kelly <dkelly@hiwaay.net> wrote: > > On Jan 17, 2011, at 9:40 PM, David J. Weller-Fahy wrote: > > > To expand on the question in the subject: How does one tell `man` not to > > automatically format man pages to 80 columns? I'm looking for a fairly > > easy way to do this, or confirmation it would involve internal > > gymnastics I may not be willing to perform. > > Perhaps FreeBSD should look into using man from MacOS X where "man -c" > will do as requested above. Will format to the output device width. > > For FreeBSD I suspect the solution involves "man -t" and then studying > how to tell groff(1) to format for one's console rather than the default > Postscript output. "man -t" generates very nice printable man pages. I'd like to mention - although this might not be a full answer to the OP's initial question - that this is similarly done when converting manual pages to PS or PDF output for better printing. man2pdf.sh: #!/bin/sh [ "$1" != "" ] && zcat `man -w $1` | \ groff -Tps -dpaper=a4 -P-pa4 -mandoc | ps2pdf - $1.pdf This would cause groff to format for A4 paper width. It's fully possible that a similar approach can be used for requesting a specific terminal width given in characters, rather than inches or centimeters (from a predefined value). -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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