How to print man pages on letter size paper

[Ross A. Osborn]

John Summerfied wrote:

> akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 09:43:45AM -0800, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
>>
>>> When I print a man page by using
>>>        man -t foo | lpr
>>> it comes out formatted for A4 size paper.  How can I force the 
>>> output to be for letter size (8-1/2 by 11 in) paper?
>>>
>>> This doesn't look as easy as it ought to be.
>>>
>>> jon
>>
>>
>> There seem to be two possibilities. Go into the cups web interface and
>> change the options of your default printer to letter and not A4.
>>
>> Alternately use mpage in place of lpr and set the page size with the -b
>> option.
>
>
> I wouldn't expect either to work especially well as the man command is 
> producing postscript for A4 paper.
>
> Best solution is for USA to conform to world standards:-)
>
> Best workaround, read /etc/profile.d/lang.sh for hints on what can be 
> set in /etc/sysconfig/i18n
>
>
"man -t" causes the the man page to be processed by "groff -Tps".  
Postscript output from groff is created with the postprocessor "grops".  
The paper size is specified in the file "DESC".  On my box (FC3) this is 
in the directory /usr/share/groff/1.18.1.1/font/devps.  This file 
contains the line:

papersize /etc/papersize a4

I think what this means is that if the file /etc/papersize exists it 
will try to get the paper size from there.  Otherwise it will default to 
a4.  On my box the file does not exist.  A simple experiment would be 
the following:

$ man -t cat > cat1.ps
$ echo "letter" > /etc/papersize
$ man -t cat > cat2.ps
$ diff cat1.ps cat2.ps


Ross