[comp.unix.questions] Problems displaying "man" pages

monty@blackhole.lerc.nasa.gov (Monty Andro) (04/25/91)

Hello,

I'm looking for help on how to display man pages that I down loaded from
uunet.uu.net from the bsd-sources directory.  Specificly, I'm attempting
to display the man page for the "lock" command.  I copied the "lock.1" file
(this looks like the man page) into our /usr/man/man1 directory and typed 
"man lock".  It finds the file ok, but it doesn't display the information
in the proper format.  It just displays a non formated paragraph of the 
text without indentation or titles.  Do I need to do anything special to the
man page before copying it into the man directory ?  Do I have a incompatible
man program ?  My workstation is a Sun386i with SunOS 4.0.2.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  

Thanks in advance,

monty 

jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) (04/26/91)

  The problem you are having is due to the fact that 4.3reno augments the
standard man macros, and your system doesn't have the augmented macros.

  The easiest short-term solution to this is to get the file
/bsd-sources/share/tmac/tmac.doc from the bsd-sources on uunet, and append it
to the front of the lock.1 file installed in /usr/man/man1 on your system.

  Alternatively, you can do this (note: if /usr/lib/tmac isn't where troff
macros live on your system, then substitute the appropriate directory for
/usr/lib/tmac in the instructions below):

1. Get the files tmac.doc and tmac.andoc from /bsd-sources/share/tmac on uunet.
2. Modify tmac.andoc so that it looks for /usr/lib/tmac/tmac.doc and
   /usr/lib/tmac/tmac.an, rather than /usr/share/tmac/tmac.doc and
   /usr/share/tmac/tmac.an.old.
3. Install tmac.doc and tmac.andoc in /usr/lib/tmac on your system.

Then, to view the man page, you type "nroff -mandoc /usr/man/man1/lock.1 |
more".

  This latter solution won't make "man" display the man page correctly.  You
could install a new version of man to do that, a version that looks for the
andoc macros instead of the an macros.  I don't *think* there's any harm in
using the andoc macros on a man page that was formatted to use only the older
an macros, but I don't know that for certain.  Alternatively, you could just
append the contents of tmac.doc to /usr/lib/tmac/tmac.an on your system, in
which case your current man, catman, etc. will probably do the right thing,
but makewhatis won't work on man pages that are written in the new format.

-- 
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