man vs man-db less/lesspipe formatting in Rawhide

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Thu Sep 2 22:10:21 UTC 2010


I just upgraded 'man' on one of my rawhide machines, and this
has obsoleted the old man package and installed man-db.

This appears to have changed how 'less' processes man page (nroff) files.

Previously, doing:

  less foo.1

would automagically process the file through:

  (echo ".pl 11i"; cat foo.1') | /usr/bin/gtbl | /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc 2>/dev/null) | less

with the result that it would display the file with bold, underline etc.

Now, doing the same command still formats the file, but in a visually
less satisfying way, with plain text and without bold, underline and
so on.

Was this an intentional change, because I don't think it looks as good ...

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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