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Full Discussion: Non-ASCII char prevents conversion of manpage to plain text
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Non-ASCII char prevents conversion of manpage to plain text Post 302460092 by LessNux on Wednesday 6th of October 2010 04:36:10 AM
Old 10-06-2010
I have found a solution. The configuration file /usr/lib/man.conf needs to be modified as I will explain below.

The man command internally calls nroff and/or groff. It also calls geqn or eqn. The file "man.conf" contains some lines that define how man will call nroff, groff, geqn and/or eqn with what options. The "-Tlatin1" option in man.conf allows man to output non-ASCII characters (0x80 through 0xFF). By replacing "-Tlatin1" with "-Tascii, man no longer outputs non-ASCII characters, and man automatically converts non-ASCII characters into ASCII equivalents such as "(C)" for the copyright character.

Before the modification:
NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -Tlatin1 -mandoc
NEQN /usr/bin/geqn -Tlatin1

After the modification:
NROFF /usr/bin/nroff -Tascii -mandoc
NEQN /usr/bin/geqn -Tascii

After the modification to "man.conf", the following command line successfully exports manual pages to plain text files.

man CommandName | col -bx > CommandName.txt



By the way, piping to "col" is necessary. Without "col", the resultant text would not be plain. The direct output from man is not plain text. The fact that the output from man to stdout (terminal) contains bold-face letters and underscored letters suggests that the text is not plain.

In fact, let the output from man be redirected to a file without "col" as shown below, and open the file with GUI-based text editor (e.g., TextEdit on Mac OS X, KWrite on KDE-equipped Linux, NotePad on Windows).

man ln > ln.txt

Then, you will see a bunch of illegible strings like the following, proving that the output is not plain text.

N[]NA[]AM[]ME[]E
S[]SY[]YN[]NO[]OP[]PS[]SI[]IS[]S
D[]DE[]ES[]SC[]CR[]RI[]IP[]PT[]TI[]IO[]ON[]N

The man command outputs lots of backspace characters, which are illegal in plain text. On GUI-based text editors, you will see square characters in place of backspace characters. Since it is difficult to display square characters on this web page, I used [] to represent a square character.


The "col" command converts the above illegible strings into the following plain text.

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION

Thus, "col" is absolutely necessary to obtain plain text from "man".


I thank cjcox and Franklin52 for trying to help me. I apologize cjcox for mistaking his generous help for a joke.
Last edited by LessNux; 10-06-2010 at 05:51 AM..
This User Gave Thanks to LessNux For This Post:
alister
 

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LEARN ABOUT PLAN9

man

MAN(1)							      General Commands Manual							    MAN(1)

NAME

       man, lookman - print or find pages of this manual

SYNOPSIS

       man [ option ...  ] [ section ...  ] title ...

       lookman key ...

DESCRIPTION

       Man  locates  and prints pages of this manual named title in the specified sections.  Title is given in lower case.  Each section is a num-
       ber; pages marked (2S), for example, belong to chapter 2.  If no section is specified, pages in all sections are printed.   Any	name  from
       the NAME section at the top of the page will serve as a title.

       The options are:

       -p     Run proof(1) on the specified man pages.

       -t     Run troff and send its output to standard output.

       -n     (Default) Print the pages on the standard output using nroff.

       Lookman prints the names of all manual sections that contain all of the key words given on the command line.

FILES

       /sys/man/?/*
	      troff source for manual; this page is /sys/man/1/man

       /sys/man/?/INDEX
	      indices searched to find pages corresponding to titles

       /sys/lib/man/secindex
	      command to make an index for a given section

       /sys/lib/man/lookman/index
	      index for lookman

SOURCE

       /rc/bin/man
       /rc/bin/lookman

SEE ALSO

       proof(1)

BUGS

       The manual was intended to be typeset; some detail is sacrificed on text terminals.
       There is no automatic mechanism to keep the indices up to date.
       Except for special cases, it doesn't recognize things that should be run through tbl and/or eqn.

																	    MAN(1)
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