[NCLUG] Fix man pages

[Bob Proulx]

John L. Bass wrote:
> > "Dave Treece" <davet at frii.com> writes:
> > 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.
> 
> Hi Dave,
> 
> On other UNIX boxes, the trick was to set TERM environment variable
> to a relatively dumb paper terminal ... try dumb or tty33, to disable
> cursor positioning in the "curses" functions.

On HP-UX fixman effectively just runs 'unexpand' on the man page.  So
you can still do that.

  man ls | unexpand -a

But I recommend using 'col -b' instead.  That will probably fix your
man pages appropriately.  This is what I do.

  man ls | col -b

However, I don't know how this relates when using a UTF8 locale
setting as is common on newer systems.  Otherwise some items such as
bullets and hyphens may be misrepresented, not sure.  But some
combination of the following will probably do what you want.

  LANG=POSIX man ls | col -b | unexpand -a

Bob