Hi Charles, On Wednesday 14 July 2010 06:50:57 Charles Plessy wrote: > Dear all, > > before updating a package, I wanted to look at the new upstream manpage, > but realised that ‘nroff -man’ does not produce the same output as ‘man’ > itself. Let's take the example of samtools(1) from the samtools package. > > With ‘man samtools’, users can see tables like the following one in the > section ‘SAM FORMAT’. > > > ┌────┬───────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── > ┐ │Col │ Field │ Description > │ > ├────┼───────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── > ┤ │ 1 │ QNAME │ Query (pair) NAME > │ │ 2 │ FLAG │ bitwise FLAG > │ │ 3 │ RNAME │ Reference sequence NAME > │ (…) > > But with ‘zcat /usr/share/man/man1/samtools.1.gz | nroff -man | less’, > here is what I get. > > center box; cb | cb | cb n | l | l . Col Field > Description _ 1 QNAME Query (pair) NAME 2 FLAG > bitwise FLAG 3 RNAME Reference sequence NAME 4 POS > 1-based leftmost POSi‐ > > > The workaround I found was to copy the new manpage in /tmp/man/man1, and > call ‘man -M /tmp/man samtools’. Does anybody know how a more convenient > to display a manpage the same way as users will get it by using ‘man’ ? > > Have a nice day,
I don't know if this would help you, but the canonical (lintian) way to check that everything is OK is like this: LANG=en_US.UTF-8 MANWIDTH=80 man --warnings -E UTF-8 -l <file> >/dev/null You might want to pipe it through |less or something to check for visual artifacts. from: http://lintian.debian.org/tags/manpage-has-errors-from-man.html Cheers. -- Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montez...@gmail.com>