[X-Unix] Is there a GUI utility for viewing UNIX man pages?

[Stewart C. Russell]

Aaron wrote:
> 
> I'm wondering if there's some kind of GUI app that would let me view
> man pages without having to first retrieve them as text from the
> terminal interface and then open them with a word processor.

well, there's the ancient xman tool, part of X. It was last revised in 
1989, and it shows. It doesn't play well unless you have a three-button 
mouse.

tkman, a tcl/tk application, used to do a lot better than xman. It was 
more of a hypertext browser than xman. I remember being able to copy and 
paste text from it. I haven't used it for about 5 years, though.

> If not, is there a better way than doing 'man <name> | cat' and then
> copying the output from the teminal window to a word processor?

'man <name> | col -b | pbcopy' will smack a clean copy of the text into 
the clipboard.

> A related question: Is there a way to produce output from a
> troff-formatted document that can be read as formatted text by
> TextEdit of similar programs?

There's a program called 'rosetta man', or 'rman', or 'polyglotman', 
which will convert manpages to various text formats. I think it does 
RTF. Failing that, there's man2html.

What *doesn't* work particularly well is 'man -t <name> > <name>.ps', 
opening the result with preview, then copying all the text. While the 
result does have fonts and styling, its spacing is fubar. I tried it, so 
you don't have to.

>  (Does anybody even use troff anymore?)

Hell yes! Deep in the bowels of many technical publishers, there are 
troff-based typesetting engines bashing out thousands of pages of text a 
day. If you've ever used a Collins dictionary, many of them are done 
with a (heavily modified) version of SoftQuad's sqtroff. Some of them 
are impossible to repeat (without massive and tedious human 
intervention) using conventional layout packages.

For more on troff's applications, please see Ralph Corderoy's troff.org

cheers,
  Stewart
(who doesn't miss the smell of checking ozalid proofs one bit.)