Export a man page in pdf

Question

Doing man -t man > man.ps will export the man page for man in postscript.

How can I export it in PDF?

I have gone through the manuals and learnt about the -T option but it's a bit unclear to me.

Solution 1

If groff and gropdf exists on your Linux system, you should be able to use

man -Tpdf man >man.pdf

(note the absence of a space between -T and pdf)

On an Ubuntu system, it should be enough to install the groff package to get access to gropdf.

The option argument to -T is passed on to groff and groff will use its -T option with the same option argument. So, read the groff manual about -T for more info.

On systems using mandoc, the groff utility does not need to be installed for the above command to work since the mandoc utility (called by man) would convert the manual to PDF by itself.

Solution 2

Make sure you have ghostscript package installed:

sudo apt-get install ghostscript

You would need to convert the postscript to the PDF; for the command last that would be:

man -t last | ps2pdf - last.pdf

Comments

[Neo_Returns]

I'm using Debian Stretch and installing only the groff package provides access to gropdf.

[Neo_Returns]

This works for me too but the above procedure suits me more, though I will use it for other purposes - thanks.

[Kusalananda]

This would convert the Postscript output of man to PDF. This would work, and for text documents it may be adequate.

[ARX]

On Ubuntu 20.04, ps2pdf is installed by default.

[Łukasz Rajchel]

Under Fedora you need to install groff-perl package on top of groff for gropdf to work.