Manual page width is fixed and I'd like it not to be

Igor Pechtchanski pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
Wed Nov 24 17:31:00 GMT 2004


On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Brian Dessent wrote:

> Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
>
> > > > -NROFF          /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc 2>/dev/null
> > > > +NROFF          /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc -rLL=`echo $MANWIDTH`n -rLT=`echo $MANWIDTH`n 2>/dev/null
> > >
> > > Just a little more info about how debian does this, in case someone
> > > wants to flesh this out for it to do "the right thing".
> > > [snip]
> > > I think they must be using their own patched version of man which adds
> > > all of the above functionality.  "man --version" says "man, version
> > > 2.4.2, 2003-09-20".  It has no man.conf that I can find.
> >
> > As I said in <http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2004-11/msg00941.html>, the
> > problem is not with man, but with groff.  With MANWIDTH=130, Cygwin's man
> > dutifully echoes '.ll 11.7i', which the nroff process promptly ignores.
>
> groff works fine.  Try the patch above to pass it "LL" and "LT"
> parameters on the command line and it formats to whatever width you
> specify.  The problem is that man does not do this.  I think the "echo
> .ll" business is needed for tbl's sake.
>
> Brian

Well, on my RedHat 7.3 system man produces the following command:

$ MANWIDTH=130 man -cd man 2>&1 | tail -1
  (cd /usr/share/man && (echo ".ll 11.7i"; echo ".pl 11i"; /usr/bin/gunzip -c '/usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz') | /usr/bin/gtbl | /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc | /usr/bin/less -isr)

which is, AFAICS, the same as the one produced on Cygwin (except for
irrelevant details).  On RedHat 7.3, groff (well, nroff) heeds the ".ll"
command, and on Cygwin/RedHat 9 it doesn't.  I'm only assuming it's
because Cygwin/RedHat 9 have version 1.18.1, and RedHat 7.3 has 1.17.2.
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_		pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		igor@watson.ibm.com
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski, Ph.D.
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

"The Sun will pass between the Earth and the Moon tonight for a total
Lunar eclipse..." -- WCBS Radio Newsbrief, Oct 27 2004, 12:01 pm EDT

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/



More information about the Cygwin mailing list