If you use groff for any sort of printing, you will discover that Mac OS X ships with the default paper size set to A4. If you use A4 paper,this hint does not apply to you. If you don't, then you need to change your paper size. The paper size is set in a file that is associated with the particular output device you use. Most of the time, you use the ps output device (for PostScript). The following bit of perl magic will edit every file named DESC in your /usr/share/groff/1.18.1/font directories and set the papersize from A4 to 'letter.' Run it from a Terminal command prompt (one line, shown as two; the backslash should allow copy/paste to work):
% sudo perl -pi -e 's/^papersize a4/papersize letter/' \
/usr/share/groff/1.18.1/font/*/DESC
If you edit the /usr -> share -> groff -> 1.18.1 -> font -> devps -> DESC file, you can change the font family to "H" or "P". That will make Helvetica or Palatino, respectively, your default font. I like Palatino.
% groff -man /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1 | ps2pdf - ls.pdf
Then I can open and read or print the ls.pdf file. This beats the heck out of printing plain text.Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040722172553477