Recipe 1.8. Printing man Pages
1.8.1 Problem
You want to print a man
page, nicely formatted and readable. You have tried
man foo | lpr, but it doesn't
look very good. The margins are too small, and all the formatting is
lost.
1.8.2 Solution
One way to print a nicely formatted man page is to use the
-t flag, which formats it especially for
printing. man finger is good for practice,
because it's only two pages long:
$ man -t finger | lpr
To use a networked printer:
$ man -t finger | lpr -P printername
To see your available printers:
$ lpstat -p -d
Another option is to use the following
command, which formats the page in HTML and sends it to the web
browser of your choice:
$ man -Hmozilla finger
Then use the browser's print command. Be sure there
is no space between -H and the browser name.
1.8.3 Discussion
All of the major Linux distributions ship with
CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System.
CUPS supports both the System V (lp) and
Berkeley (lpr) commands. This recipe uses the
Berkeley commands. Here is the System V equivalent.
$ man -t finger | lp
To use a networked printer:
$ man -t finger | lp -d printername
1.8.4 See Also
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