On 09-Aug-09 11:46:06, Ralph Corderoy wrote: > Hi, > Pete Phillips wrote: >> 3 - I'm really interested in learning more about zsh - and I've got a >> free evening ! >> >> man zsh | a2ps >> >> wait for the dead tree to arrive in the printer tray, stick it in my >> rucksack > > man(1) will produce nicely formatted PostScript for you, rather than > printing out a fixed-width version. > > man -t bash | ps2pdf - bash.1.pdf > > BTW, does anyone else find the dashes used for options ugly in > bash.1.pdf, e.g. the `-c string' and the `--debugger'. > > $ zcat /usr/share/man/man1/bash.1.gz | grep debugger | sed q > .B \-\-debugger > > I think they should be using plain `-', i.e. as > http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/man/1/troff does. > > Cheers, > Ralph.
An interesting and distinctly moot point! I agree that the "\-" come out too close together in the PS output, and the effect is even worse in lines like --dump-strings where the "-" between "dump" and "strings" really should come out as a true hyphen if set in Times. On the other hand, I do feel that the "-" or "--" which flags an option would look better if it were in the more conspicuous "\-" form. So, on that basis, "--dump-strings" should be sent to groff as "\-\-dump-strings". But this still has the defect that the "--" aqre too close together. At the magnification at which they would be printed, they are almost indistinguishable. However, I have no taste for getting tangled with the diktattery (GNU or other) about how man pages must be formatted! I can only say, speaking for myself, that if I were writing this kind of thing in Times, I would want to set things like command-line text in Courier Bold (and at a slightly reduced point size). Say something like \s-1\f[CB]--init-file \fP\f[CBI]file\fP\s0 .br \s-1\f[CB]--rcfile \fP\f[CBI]file\fP\s0 .IP \"If using ms macros Execute commands from \s-1\f[CBI]file\fP\s0 instead of the system wide initialization file \s-1\f[CBI]/etc/bash.bashrc\fP\s0 and the standard personal initialization file \s-1\f[CBI]~/.bashrc\fP\s0 if the shell is interactive (see \fBINVOCATION\fP below). I think this looks much better -- and is more readily interpreted by the reader, which is important! Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.hard...@manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 09-Aug-09 Time: 13:59:24 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------