man pages in plain text - how to?

[gs_stoller at juno.com]

	On  Fri, 9 Jun 2006 15:28:07 -0400 , Charles Swiger wrote:
<snip>
> On Jun 9, 2006, at 3:01 PM, Wayne wrote:
>> Was wondering how to get "man" to output pages in plain text? I want 
>> the basic formating (indentation & whatnot) but NOT the bold and other 
>> special effects.  Just ascii text I can grep through.  I tried setting 
>> the terminal type to "dumb" and the stupid thing still tries to do 
>> back-space overstrike bolding (jeesh - even LA-120s had fancier print 
>> capabilities than that, IIRC.)
<snip>
	The easiest way to do it, I believe, is with  col .  (Just try 'man
col' to check all the options.)  I have used 'man  topic  |  col -b' to
see the man page for  topic  with all the egregious stuff removed, and
I just append to the pipeline '>topic.man' if I want to save it.