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Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen

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On Fri 01 Oct 2021 at 20:53:26 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 01, 2021 at 05:44:41PM -0700, Fred wrote:
> > man command | col -b > command.txt
> 
> Curious.
> 
> unicorn:~$ man ls > ls1
> unicorn:~$ man ls | col -b > ls2
> unicorn:~$ ls -l ls1 ls2
> -rw-r--r-- 1 greg greg 8299 Oct  1 20:49 ls1
> -rw-r--r-- 1 greg greg 7745 Oct  1 20:49 ls2
> 
> Glancing at the diff -u between the two files, most of the changes
> appear to be whitespace related.
> 
> Opening them both in vim, the second one has a bunch of literal tab
> characters, whereas the first one has no tabs at all -- only spaces.
> 
> So I guess most (or all?) of the size reduction is groups of spaces
> being replaced by tabs.

Yes, diff -ubw will confirm that whitespace is the only difference.
I'm too lazy to check that the /apparently/ significant differences
shown by diff and diff -u are merely caused by the left-margin offset,
which makes TABs skip to different columns from those intended.

Like others, I tried to guess what Gene really wanted (I can barely
believe the answer) and to come up with a suitable method. I also
tried out others' suggestions. We don't know what the mysterious
man 9 actually is (unless there's a well-known command named "9"),
so I used   man man   and   man bash¹.

$ man man > /tmp/man.txt
$ man --ascii man > /tmp/man.txt

If you use this, and then intend to print it, have a care what the
width of your window is set to. Too narrow and you get hyphena‐
tion hell; too wide and you have to shrink it down to fit the paper.

$ man -t man > /tmp/man.txt (wrong)
$ man -t man > /tmp/man.ps

Good for people who still have a PostScript workflow.
Myself, I prefer:

$ man -t man > /tmp/scratch.ps && ps2pdf /tmp/scratch.ps /tmp/man.pdf

And if you have a big screen, you can postprocess it with, say,

$ pdfjam --vanilla --nup '2x1' --noautoscale true --scale 1 --landscape --papersize '{11in,17in}' --outfile /tmp/man-2up.pdf /tmp/man.pdf

and have double spreads. US paper sizes. ☹

File sizes:

Not usually much of an issue nowadays. But let's see:

  66546  /tmp/man.pdf
  72147  /tmp/man.ps
  35932  /tmp/man.txt

and   col -b   can reduce the size of man.txt a little.
But moving on to bash:

 377528  /tmp/bash.pdf
 616850  /tmp/bash.ps
 345111  /tmp/bash.txt

Not such a big difference now between the text and PDF.
And I can easily close that gap by revealing what I haven't
earlier: /tmp/bash.txt was generated on a 121-wide xterm.
So, running  COLUMNS=NNN man --ascii bash > /tmp/bashNNN.txt
to simulate different widths, we get:

 377528  /tmp/bash.pdf

 381919  /tmp/bash072.txt
 371213  /tmp/bash080.txt
 355442  /tmp/bash100.txt
 345111  /tmp/bash121.txt

And I would finally add that reading through any of /tmp/bash*.txt is
/very/ heavy going, and difficult to absorb, because of the frequency
of special terms, which usually would be coloured or marked up.

¹ Decades ago, I used to print out big man pages, such as bash, fvwm
  and ffmpeg, so that I could read through them in an armchair (no
  laptop then). I still generate PDFs for those and others, as I find
  the result easiest on the eye. I also find them easiest to navigate
  (flicking back and forth) because the formatted pages have the most
  distinguishable individual appearance.

Cheers,
David.

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Thread

What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-01 18:30 +0200
  Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Larry Martell <larry.martell@gmail.com> - 2021-10-01 18:40 +0200
    Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-01 23:00 +0200
      Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2021-10-01 23:10 +0200
        Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-01 23:30 +0200
          Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2021-10-01 23:40 +0200
      Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Fred <fred@blakemfg.com> - 2021-10-02 02:50 +0200
        Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2021-10-02 03:00 +0200
          Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2021-10-02 05:00 +0200
            Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-02 13:30 +0200
              Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2021-10-02 15:00 +0200
          Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-02 13:20 +0200
        Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-02 11:40 +0200
  Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Cindy Sue Causey <butterflybytes@gmail.com> - 2021-10-01 18:50 +0200
    Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-01 23:10 +0200
  Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Lee <ler762@gmail.com> - 2021-10-01 20:00 +0200
    Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it  on-screen Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com> - 2021-10-01 20:10 +0200
    Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-01 23:10 +0200
      Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2021-10-01 23:20 +0200
        Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-01 23:40 +0200
          Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2021-10-02 17:20 +0200
            Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-02 21:50 +0200
              Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2021-10-02 22:10 +0200
                Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-02 23:40 +0200
              Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it  on-screen Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com> - 2021-10-02 23:10 +0200
  Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2021-10-01 21:50 +0200
    Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-01 23:20 +0200
  Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> - 2021-10-02 13:50 +0200
    Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> - 2021-10-02 14:50 +0200
    Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2021-10-02 15:10 +0200
      Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2021-10-02 16:40 +0200
        Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> - 2021-10-02 18:00 +0200
          Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> - 2021-10-02 19:40 +0200
      Re: What do we have that will save a manpage as we see it on-screen Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> - 2021-10-02 18:00 +0200

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