Pretty-Print Manual Pages as PS, PDF, or HTML

post from Mac Geekery - Get your geek on. on 10 April 2006 05:00:59 AM. © Mac Geekery - Get your geek on.

You can use the groff tool to convert manual pages into PostScript, PDF, or HTML form for pretty viewing, printing, posting to a webpage, easy searching with Spotlight, or any other purpose, if you like. Manpages are stored in a simple mandoc format for which the groff formatting tool has an understanding (indeed, groff is used by man to display the page in the first place). groff also has an understanding of a wide variety of other formats to display things in, however man only uses the normal display format so only the few that look into such things would notice the fun to be had.

First, to get a manual page that looks like the version man brings up, you tell groff to use ASCII or UTF8 as the output form. To get groff to do it, however, you need to tell it the location of the actual mandoc file, which man gives you with the -w flag.

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