Printing man pages in A4 paper

Hello.

I use the command line

$ man -t setfont | lpr

to print the manual page for setfont. But the
command "man -t setfont" outputs a PostScript
file formated for letter paper.

How can I get it to format for A4 paper?

Regards.

Romildo

On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 07:32:38PM -0300, [e-mail] wrote:
> I use the command line
>
> $ man -t setfont | lpr
>
> to print the manual page for setfont. But the
> command "man -t setfont" outputs a PostScript
> file formated for letter paper.
>
> How can I get it to format for A4 paper?

With some help and some searching, I came to this
solution:

The groff home page (http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/groff.html),
in the section "macro packages", tells about the option
"-dpaper=<size>" available to groff through the papersize.tmac file.

It is enough to edit /etc/man.conf and add the options
"-dpaper=a4 -P-pa4" to the line which reads
"TROFF/usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc", which becomes:

TROFF   /usr/bin/groff -Tps -dpaper=a4 -P-pa4 -mandoc

With this setup, the command "man -t setfont" will
output a PostScript file formatted for A4 paper by
groff.

This solution is better than using enscript because
it does typography considerations (by groff) when
producing the output.

Regards.

Romildo

[Andrea Giuliano]

Maybe "mpage" could be of help. You can use it as a filter this way:

$ man -t setfont | mpage -b A4 -1 | lpr

the "-b A4" option is self-explanatory. The "-1" option means "a single 
page on a sheet", otherwise the default behaviour of mpage is "four 
pages on a sheet", not very easy to read.

Unfortunately, mpage has several other defaults that you probably want 
to turn off (borders, datestamps and such). However, you should not have 
any problem with them, just read the man.

Best regards.

[e-mail] wrote:
> Hello.
>
> I use the command line
>
> $ man -t setfont | lpr
>
> to print the manual page for setfont. But the
> command "man -t setfont" outputs a PostScript
> file formated for letter paper.
>
> How can I get it to format for A4 paper?
>
> Regards.
>
> Romildo