Baslinux mailing list

[Lee Forrest <lforrestster AT gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 03:06:05PM -0800, David Moberg wrote:
> Lee Forrest wrote:
> > This is from the sed&awk book. I haven't tested it
> > because the only manpages I have are not in nroff.
> >
> > s/.^H//g
> > s/^[9//g
> > s/^[ ^I]*//g
> > s/^I/ /g
> 

> This removes the non-printing characters or replaces them
> with spaces?

Only the last line. They are eliminated in the other 3, with
the first one removing any character before the ^H too.

> That will extract plain text, I think.

That's the idea.

> Is there
> an easy way to use ANSI escape sequences (for colors, bold,
> highlighting)? Perhaps a separate script could handle those.

It can be done. Steven knows how.

> [troff]
>
> > I wrote a crude script using sed that reformats them, and
> > will be doing some work on it. Search "man2text1.sh" in the
> > archives.
>
> I tried it on a random manpage and it didn't work quite right,

That's what I meant by 'crude' :-)

> although the output was mostly plain text.

That's the intent. The object is have man pages one can easily
edit.

> Perhaps this was a nroff or groff script?

For troff.

> I will experiment with what you have
> posted.

Good. Be sure to post any improvements.

> Thanks for sharing these sed scripts.

Sure. I just want to contribute _something_, and Sindi raised the
question a while back.

Lee

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