[NCLUG] Fix man pages

[Dave Treece]

  On HP-UX someone had written a program called fixman that was installed as
part of the system files. This program "fixed" man pages so that tabs were
expanded to spaces, but more importantly (and the reason for this query) is
that it removed all the control characters (used for backspacing and such to
make words bold and what-not). The end result being that they were sometimes
a bit faster to display, but they would also always display correctly on any
terminal - hence my query....

  Is there something like that for linux, or is there a magic incantation
for the man command such that control chars are stripped/ignored when
displaying man pages.

  FWIW - I have a dumb terminal (very dumb) I use with my system and the
control chars don't display right when I view man pages on it. I usually
remote into my box, but once in a while I use this dumb terminal. I really
don't give a hoot about faster - which is all relative anyway - but really
just want plain text output.

Thanks for your insights!

--
Dave Treece
davet at frii.com