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RE: Bold text in man pages

Subject: RE: Bold text in man pages
From: "Kat Nagel, MasterWork Consulting" <mlists -at- masterworkconsulting -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2003 12:04:16 -0400


mcollier -at- maryland -dot- com wrote:
>Anyone know why words in bold text print out with duplicate characters when the man page is exported to a text file, and what can be done about it?
>
>For example when I do "man ssh > ssh.txt" and open the file in BBEdit or TextEdit (Mac OS X) bold words come out as "NNAAMMEE", "SSYYNNOOPPSSIISS", etc.

It sounds as if you're running into the dread Control Character syndrome.

(WARNING! Nostalgia Alert)

The original UNIX printer control characters were meant to work with teletype output devices that produced 'bold' by overprinting each character with a slight offset for the overprint. In other words, each character was printed twice.

I first saw it back in 19mumble, when my department upgraded from a teletype to the first commercially available PostScript printer. Sheet after sheet of lovely-looking printed documents, with every heading rendered with DDOOUUBBLLEEDD LLEETTEERRSS. <sigh> Management was not amused.

You might try printing directly from the man page instead of exporting it to text. Alternatively, if you need to save it as a separate file, just copy and paste into a new file instead of exporting. That way, you should leave behind the control characters.

--
Kat Nagel
who also has amusing stories about hand-coding postscript code into print files, if anyone is interested. No? Oh, well.

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References:
RE: Bold text in man pages: From: Mike Stockman

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