On 1/16/06 12:20 PM, "Brian Johnson" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> This last digest has lots of food for thought! To start digesting, I
> copied and pasted Shane's script to a new file, saved it as a .scpt,
> dropped it innto my scripts folder, and ran it. Works great, except the
> postscript opens into Apple's TextEdit rather than Preview. The file _is_
> postscript, but the name ends in .txt. Obviously, TextEdit renders it as
> text, so it's not terribly useful. I checked -- /Applications/Preview.app
> exists, so how's it getting ahold of TextEdit?

What file are you referring to? Although there obviously is a man file
somewhere, plus the command makes a PDF somewhere, you don't need to know
about either one. You're just supposed to enter the terminal command in
whose 'man' you're interested, not a file path, in the display dialog. E.g.
    
    hdiutil

That's all. It takes a few moments (unlike Man Open which is really fast but
opens a plain text version) then opens a formatted PDF in Preview. You don't
need to find any file. But its file name displayed in the Preview title bar
does end in .pdf, viz

A4143742-9962-4A50-B789-6F7E0BB15AB8-1679-0000093E459F2615.pdf

Quite a file name. No idea where it's located, Even Spotlight can't find it.
Perhaps it has only a "virtual" reality (i.e. it's an unsaved document):
Preview is an app that shows a file's path hierarchy when you click on the
title bar while pressing command key. But when you do that with this 10-page
document. Tools/Get Info/Details show its "PDF Producer" is
"PSNormalizer.framework". It must be an unsaved document, although Preview
itself is a read-only app.

Using the script on 'man' itself produces a pdf doc that says the -t option
does this:

?t  Use/usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc -c to format the manual page, passing the
output to stdout. The output from/usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc -cmay need to
be passed through some filter or another before being printed.

 



-- 
Paul Berkowitz