10.3: Easily view man pages with Preview
Nov 02, '03 10:39:00AM
Contributed by: Anonymous
This is a Panther-specific update to an older hint regarding viewing man pages with Preview. Now that Preview supports viewing PostScript files and also includes the necessary PostScript utilities you can simply do something along the lines of:
#!/bin/sh
man -t $1 > /tmp/$1.ps
open /tmp/$1.ps
This will create a PostScript file for the command you're trying to get the man page of, store it in the /tmp directory, and then open it using Preview.
[robg adds: Though this is technically an update to an older hint, I'm running it as new because (a) it's much simpler than the previous solution, as ghostscript no longer needs to be installed, and (b) because it's so nice. I created the script and called it preman and made it executable (chmod 755 preman). Now it's a joy to browse and read huge things like the tcsh man page. There are, of course, third-party apps like ManOpen and manThor that do the same thing, if you prefer a pure GUI solution.]
Comments (36)
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20031028094657553