Re: man page portability concern

[Bob Proulx]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> Another possibility on Solaris 8 is to pipe nroff's output through the
> 'col' command (e.g., 'nroff -man manpage | col'); this will filter out
> the model-37 characters and will cause '\(co' to output as 'c', which
> is perhaps the best that can be done on some devices.

Let me second the usefulness of 'col'.  I don't like the funky
overstrike mode and use it to "clean up" the output.

Paul,
But wouldn't someone need 'col -b'?  I have always used it that way
and now can't say if it is require or not.

:     -b      Do not output any backspaces, printing only the last character
:             written to each column position.

Otherwise the description does not say it cleans up backspaces as you
describe.

Bob