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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.mel.connect.com.au!news.mira.net.au!vic.news.telstra.net!act.news.telstra.net!psgrain!iafrica.com!uct.ac.za!quagga.ru.ac.za!howland.erols.net!news1.erols.com!hunter.premier.net!news-peer.gsl.net!news.gsl.net!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!netnews.nwnet.net!symiserver2.symantec.com!usenet From: tedm@agora.rdrop.com Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: /usr/share/doc Date: 19 Sep 1996 08:06:42 GMT Organization: Symantec Corporation Lines: 40 Message-ID: <51quui$gol@symiserver2.symantec.com> References: <01bba346$77b96ea0$df6d04c7@zellion.cyberwind.com> <51mqg7$14g@anorak.coverform.lan> Reply-To: tedm@agora.rdrop.com NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.6.34.1 X-Newsreader: IBM NewsReader/2 v1.2.5 In <51mqg7$14g@anorak.coverform.lan>, brian@awfulhak.demon.co.uk (Brian Somers) writes: >Jeffery T. White (zellion@cyberwind.com) wrote: >: There are several directories under here (/usr/share/doc/smm) that appear >: to have some sort of documentation in them. They each have a Title.ascii.gz >: and Contents.ascii.gz file and many subdirectories. What program reads and >: displays these files? I've tried gunziping them but the remaing text is >: still formatted. Are these the tared versions of the man pages or something >: else? > >These aren't formatted - they just have lots of ^H's in them. This is a >backspace, allowing programs such as more & less to "highlight" things. > This is actually a carryover from older dot-matrix printers. If you feed this raw output into a dot-matrix printer, the print head will backup over the x letter and overstrike it multiple times. WIth a moderately older ribbon, this will result in the characters with backspaces after them to be printed much darker than the other characters. These are probably manual pages you have, they usually go in a directory somewhere in the MANPATH. Do a "man man" to get help with the system manual and learn how to install the pages. Once the pages are placed where you want them, you should run the "makewhatis" command to rebuild the whatis database, this will add in your new man pages. (strange that this is not documented in the man pages for the manual!! :-) ) There is a command, col, which you can pipe these pages through that strips out all the backspaces and their letters, leaving normal ASCII files that can go to a modern laserprinter. There is also a nroff macro specially set up to handle man pages. If you want to print those pages, you can do something like: cat mymanpage.gz | gunzip | nroff -man | col -b | lpr -P printer This will nicely format them for a laser printer.