Remote man page server (was man -t to lpr (man flamed))

[Scott R. Presnell]

karron at MCIRPS2.MED.NYU.EDU writes:

>Jim Simms (sims at enh.nist.gov) writes:

>>I have recently discovered the -t option to man, for typesetting
>>man pages and sending to a printer. I am running 3.3.1 and using
>>lpr rather than lp, hence the problem. man -t sends to lp; I
>>want to be able to send to lpr. Anyone know how to do this?
>>According to the man page, *.z files are unpacked using pcat
>>and then sent to the named printer. Presumably there is more
>>processing than that going on. If I knew exactly what man does,
>>I could write a small script to do the job.

>I don't know how to fix the man binary.

>I also don't know why sgi (or ATT) made the man program into a compiled
>binary, leaving us without the source.  In the old days the man command was a

[...]

Well, I have a partial solution... I ported "rman," the manual page
client/server model for our cluster of 4D's.  Anyone who wants it is
welcome to it.  I make no guarantees, but it seems to work for us here (1
server, 4 clients with probably more to come).  Some of it's really hacked
up to deal with packed pages and no man page source, but was a way for me
to learn something about services like this.  It also has a builtin
"apropos" and "whatis." (the program that makes these databases is
something else again, but I've seen several posted.  You can specifiy the
file to look for in the rman configuration.)  I've set it up to use a
script to do the reformatting, so you may be able to set up an rsh call to
do your formatting on another host.

The answer with this version of man is:
	"man - <fill in the blank> | col -b | lpr" 

	...comes out looking fine.  Let me know if anyone is interested.
If so, I'll make it available.

	- Scott 
--
Scott Presnell				        +1 (415) 476-9890
Pharm. Chem., S-926				Internet: srp at cgl.ucsf.edu
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