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Some docs files are called foo.1 or bar.man or baz.nroff, and they seem to be written in some weird format which is very difficult to read. How can I convert them to readable text files?

That weird format is the troff format which is used for formatting Unix manual pages. The Unix command man converts them to formatted text files which are usually displayed with a program like more or less (and here less is considered to be more than more :-). The formatted file includes bold and underlined letters produced by overtyping using backspace characters. To format these files, you can choose one of these methods:

No matter which of the above methods you chose, you will need some kind of browser which understands how to show bold and underlined letters instead of backspace-overtyped characters. I suggest to download a DOS port of GNU less, which uses colors to show bold and underlined letters. You can find it as less177e.zip on any SimTel mirror in the textutil directory. Another possibility is to get the latest official GNU less distribution which can be compiled out of the box with the Microsoft C compiler (but I didn't try to do so).

Another possibility to read formatted man pages would be with an Emacs editor, if you use one.


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