>> I tried this "manually" in terminal
>> 
>> Man cp >~/mydoc.txt
>> 
>> But the result includes some "stuttering", so I'm wondering about the
>> what
>> would happen if I tried to use this with do shell script.
> 
> Doesn't your teletype machine understand that double characters
> seperated by a ascii 8 are to be bolded?
> This handler will correct the formating. Still a little strange around
> the brackets. Hmmm.
> 
> man("cp")
> 
> on man(theCommand)
>       set t to do shell script "man " & theCommand
>       set the alphabet to
> "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz-"
>       set d to ASCII character 8
>       repeat with C in characters of alphabet
>               set AppleScript's text item delimiters to C & d & C
>               set t to text items of t
>               set AppleScript's text item delimiters to (C as text)
>               set t to t as text
>       end repeat
>       set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "•"
>       set t to text items of t
>       set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
>       return t as text
> end man

Thanks; but it turns out that there is an existing shell command variation
that can handle this

Man cp | col -b >mydoc.txt