A coworker forwarded me a really simple script for converting man pages on my Mac into PDFs. It was based on this tip from Macworld.
There were a few minor problems though, in that this generated a PostScript file which Preview took some time to convert, and there was no kind of caching if you opened the same man page twice in a row.
This was easily fixed by using pstopdf to convert the PostScript to PDF before opening it in Preview and writing the PDF files into the system's temp directory in a standard format.
Add the following to your ~/.bash_profile to create the command:
pman()
{
PMANFILE="/tmp/pman-${1}.pdf"
if [ ! -e $PMANFILE ]; then # only create if it doesn't already exist
man -t "${1}" | pstopdf -i -o "$PMANFILE"
fi
if [ -e $PMANFILE ]; then # in case create failed
open -a /Applications/Preview.app/ "$PMANFILE"
fi
}
You can then run pman bash to quickly get a 60-page PDF with the entire bash documentation. Nice! (This is a function rather than an alias because aliases can't take arguments in bash — see the bash documentation.)
I found this so useful and much easier to read than the console, that I made it my default man behaviour by aliasing the default command:
alias man=pman
Now, running man diff works really nicely. It generates a PDF which is cached, and opens the PDF in Preview where it is easy to search and read.
My previous articles related to scripting and Unix are:
