On Wed 26 Feb 2014 10:19:07 Mike Bianchi wrote:
> I cannot find man.config or any reference to it in Debian 7.4 (wheezy).
> 2.6.2 2012-06-18 MAN(1)
> Only manpath.config .
>
> What am I missing?
>
> --
> Mike Bianchi
> Foveal Systems
>
> 973 822-2085
It looks like on debian the answer is to create a shell script called
"mandb_tfmt" to do exactly what you want when man -t is used. Unfortunately my
only version of debian is on a sheevaplug which is not up to running an X
server, but the man page says:-
A formatting pipeline is formed from the filters and the primary
formatter (nroff or [tg]roff with -t) and executed.
Alternatively, if an executable program mandb_nfmt (or mandb_tfmt
with -t) exists in the man tree root, it is executed
instead. It gets passed the manual source file, the preprocessor
string, and optionally the device specified with -T or
-E as arguments.
So it should be possible to achieve the same sort of thing. I believe the
difference is that my Mageia uses man version 1.6g and debian (6.0.3) uses
man-db 2.5.7.
I also found this:-
5.5. Format scripts
It is very likely that alternate systems manual pages may require non-standard
macro packages or possibly
even special pre-processors. To tackle such problems, special format scripts
may be created on a per man-
ual hierarchy basis.
If the file
<manual_hierarchy>/mandb_nfmt
exists and is executable, it is expected to be able to correctly format a
manual page originating from <man-
ual_hierarchy> to its standard output. It will be supplied with either two or
three arguments:
• manual page filename
• pre-processor string
• ouput device (optional)
Similarly, if the option −T<device> or −t was supplied to man and the file
<manual_hierarchy>/mandb_tfmt
exists and is executable, it will be used in the same way.
An example of such a script, supplied by Markus Armbruster
<arm...@pond.sub.org>, who provided sup-
port for external formatter scripts, can be found as tools/mandb_[nt]fmt
The script can be used as both a NROFF and TROFF/GROFF format script and can be
installed as
mandb_nfmt and hard linked to mandb_tfmt after modification appropriate for
your particular site.
