Re: Change man format

[Chris Jones]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 04:28:42PM EST, Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
> Is it possible to change the formatting of man pages so that they are
> not justified and have no hyphenation?
> 
> If so, which files have to be modified, and what would need to be
> changed?

Try to add the .na and .nh requests to 'man.local'.

On debian lenny the file is /etc/groff/man.local.

After making your changes, the file looks like this:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
.\" This file is loaded after an-old.tmac.
.\" Put any local modifications to an-old.tmac here.
.
.if n \{\
.  \" Debian: Map \(oq to ' rather than ` in nroff mode for devices other
.  \" than utf8.
.  if !'\*[.T]'utf8' \
.    tr \[oq]'
.
.  \" Debian: Disable the use of SGR (ANSI colour) escape sequences by
.  \" grotty.
.  if '\V[GROFF_SGR]'' \
.    output x X tty: sgr 0
.
.  \" Debian: Map \- to the Unicode HYPHEN-MINUS character, to make
.  \" searching in man pages easier.
.  if '\*[.T]'utf8' \
.    char \- \N'45'
.
.  \" Debian: Many UTF-8 man pages use "-" instead of "\-" for dashes such
.  \" as those in command-line options. This is a bug in those pages, but
.  \" too many fonts are missing the Unicode HYPHEN character, so we render
.  \" this as the ASCII-compatible HYPHEN-MINUS instead.
.  if '\*[.T]'utf8' \
.    char - \N'45'
.na
.nh
.\}
------------------------------------------------------------------------

See the "REQUESTS" section of "man 7 groff" for details.

CJ