I never got quite around to reading Unix manual pages anywhere else than in the shell with the built-in man command. The freeware manpage renderer Bwana finally made me reconsider, as it, IMHO, renders man pages really beautifully in HTML. All that's missing from Bwana is the possibility to invoke it from the shell, as for example to read the manpage of man:
$ bwana man
Would then open the manpage in a new tab in Safari. So I slapped together a script that opens Safari if it's not yet open, activates it, checks for an existing window and opens one (if there is none) or a tab (if there is a window). Then it constructs a URL to the manpage of the form man:/usr/share/man/man1/man and passes it to the shell command open, which in turn passes the URL to Safari, which invokes the handler for the man: protocol, which happens to be Bwana ... whew!
This just works for me with Safari and is in no way optimised. To make it work with other browsers, the AppleScript portion of the shell script has to be adapted. Also, I'm neither really proficient in shell nor AppleScripting, so unexpected things might happen with this script. Access for assistive devices has to be enabled in the Universal Access preference pane; otherwise the last AppleScript line won't work. Save the script somewhere in your path and call it something meaningful (e.g. bwana as in the example above) and make it executable (chmod 755 bwana).
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/osascript -e 'tell application "Safari" to activate'
#
# The following three lines must be one long line with a
# space replacing each line break!
/usr/bin/osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to tell
application process "Safari" to click menu item "New Tab" of
menu "File" of menu bar item "File" of menu bar 1'
#
/usr/bin/open 'man:'$(/usr/bin/man -w $1 | /usr/bin/sed 's/\/.*\///')
[robg adds: This worked as described for me...]
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=200412080923108