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joeybaumgartner/man2pdf.sh

Last active December 21, 2023 06:23
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Script for opening PDF documents in Preview on macOS Ventura and newer.
Raw
man2pdf.sh
#!/bin/sh
if [ $# -lt 1 ]
then
echo “man2pdf [man page name]”
exit
fi
tempfoo=`basename $0`
TMPPDFFILE=`mktemp /tmp/${tempfoo}.XXXXXX` || exit 1
man -t $* | pstopdf -o $TMPPDFFILE
export psStatus=$?
if [ $psStatus -ne 0 ]; then
echo "Could not output contents of man page to temp file"
exit 1
fi
open -a Preview.app $TMPPDFFILE
@joeybaumgartner
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Before macOS Ventura, you could open any man page in Preview.app with the following command:

man -t <manpage> | open -f -a Preview.app

However, the Preview application in this version of macOS no longer supports opening .ps or .eps files. This script writes the output of man on stdin to pstopdf to a temporary file on disk, and then opens that file in Preview.app.

@joeybaumgartner
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Made an edit based on this comment from a reddit thread so that you can specify the man section you're interested in.

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