Use Preview to view man pages
Published November 15th, 2005 in UNIX, CoolHere’s a cool trick that converts man pages to postscript and opens the file in Preview. Add this to your .tcshrc file in your home directory:
alias preman 'man -t \!^ > /tmp/\!^.ps; open /tmp/\!^.ps'
Then to open man pages in Preview type:
preman NAMEHERE
Here, thanks for the idea Ronge
I took your idea and extended it to a “better solution”. At least I think it is. Doing an alias will only work in one type of shell. So to get around that you could write a very simple bash script. I personally did this because I prefer bash shell.
So for example I created scripted named “preman”. It contains this:
#!/bin/bash
man -t $* > /tmp/$*.ps
open /tmp/$*.ps
######################
This very simple script will do the exact same thing, only you can launch from any shell. You will want to put this script in your $PATH. I personally just put script in /bin dir. You will have to cp over as sudo though, and remember to change permission on script to execute (chmod a+x /bin/preman) for all users. If you need more instruction just comment here asking for more help.
for those of you who use bash, just put:
preman ()
{
man -t $* > /tmp/$*.ps
open /tmp/$*.ps
}
inside of your .bashrc of .bash_profile file.