manpage printing

[Kevin R. Perry]

Can anyone suggest an easy and preferably transparent-to-the-user
way to fix the following printing problem?  Under 3.2 I had been using
Bevis Ip's BSD-like 'man' shell script, and I had hacked it a bit
to be able to print in our environment here.  But I thought it'd be
nice to start using the standard SGI man command when we upgraded
to 3.3.1.  It seems a good bit better than their older versions.

Now, we occasionally want to get hardcopy of a manual page, and
(this is the difficult part) we have no printers locally attached
to an IRIS.  Instead, the IRISes do remote spooling to a SUN running
Transcript software, to a LaserWriter.  When I do a "man -t", the lp
job gets sent off to the SUN, but then TranScript chokes complaining about "Spooled Binary File Rejected" - apparently because it doesn't like all
the backspaces in the input.

How do I get "man" to give me a TranScript'able file, or tell
TranScript how to deal with backspacing?  Or do I have to go
back to having a shell script in place of "man"?  And if so,
is there a better invocation than what I had come up with, essentially
"...| ul -t diablo630 | ps630 | lpr...", and was not very satisfying.

thanks,
Kevin Perry
Princeton Univ. - CIT/ICGL
<perry at princeton.edu>