Many thanks to everybody for their interesting answers. Here is a short summary, and examples for a manpage called manpage.1.gz, in the current directory.
Have a nice week-end, -- Charles How to test a local manpage. Some manual pages are using helpers, usually ‘tbl’, ‘eqn’ or ‘pic’. In these cases, a simple command like ‘nroff -man’ will not be enough to process them. Preprocessors can be invoked through command-line options, like ‘-t’ for ‘tbl‘. A list of these options can be found in the groff(1) manpage, and groffer(1) can autodetect them. Alternatively, they can be ran separately as filters, like in the following example: zcat manpage.1.gz | tbl | nroff -man > manpage.txt ‘man’ can also be used to open a manpage that is in the current directory, by using the -l (--local) option, or by indicating its path: man -l manpage.1.gz man ./manpage.1.gz In Debian, the manual pages are using the UTF-8 encoding. To visualise a local manpage with man or groff the same way as it would appear to the users once it is installed in /usr/share/man/, the encoding has to be specified: zcat manpage.1 | groff -T utf8 -man > manpage.txt man -E UTF-8 -l manpage.1.gz > manpage.txt When inspecting a manpage, it may be better to assume a 80-columns terminal, by setting the environment variable MANWIDTH. Using the C or the en_US.UTF-8 locales also gets the environment closer to a default Debian installation. In full, a command to test a manpage before including it in a Debian package looks like this: # Displays the warnings LANG=en_US.UTF-8 MANWIDTH=80 man --warnings -E UTF-8 -l manpage.1.gz > /dev/null # Displays the manpage with ‘less’. LANG=C MANWIDTH=80 man --warning -l manpage.1.gz | less -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100717025029.ga22...@merveille.plessy.net
