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:
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LEARN ABOUT OPENDARWIN
nroff
NROFF(1) General Commands Manual NROFF(1)
NAME
nroff - emulate nroff command with groff
SYNOPSIS
nroff [ -h ] [ -i ] [ -mname ] [ -nnum ] [ -olist ] [ -p ] [ -rcn ] [ -S ] [ -t ] [ -Tname ] [ -U ] [ -v ] [ file ... ]
DESCRIPTION
The nroff script emulates the nroff command using groff. Only ascii, latin1, utf8, and cp1047 are valid arguments for the -T option. If
an invalid or no -T option is given, nroff checks the current locale to select a default output device. It first tries the locale program,
then the environment variables LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, and LANG, and finally the LESSCHARSET environment variable.
The -h and -c options are equivalent to grotty's options -h (using tabs in the output) and -c (using the old output scheme instead of SGR
escape sequences). The -C, -i, -n, -m, -o, and -r options have the effect described in troff(1). In addition, nroff silently ignores the
options -e, -q, and -s (which are not implemented in troff). Options -p (pic), -t (tbl), -S (safer), and -U (unsafe) are passed to groff.
-v shows the version number.
ENVIRONMENT
GROFF_BIN_PATH
A colon separated list of directories in which to search for the groff executable before searching in PATH. If unset, `/usr/bin' is
used.
NOTES
This shell script is basically intended for use with man(1), so warnings are suppressed. nroff-style character definitions (in the file
tty-char.tmac) are also loaded to emulate unrepresentable glyphs.
SEE ALSO
groff(1), troff(1), grotty(1)
Groff Version 1.18.1 Nov 2003 NROFF(1)