Ubuntu – How to read man pages in the native language

You can do this easily using vim or gedit.

As vim and gedit can edit the zipped files, you can do :

vim "$(man -w tsql)"
gedit "$(man -w tsql)"

$() is the shell command substitution pattern, which will be replaced by the output of man -w tsql. So if the output of man -w tsql is /usr/share/man/man1/tsql, the above commands are equivalent to :

vim /usr/share/man/man1/tsql
gedit /usr/share/man/man1/tsql

Even more special would be being able to get this specifically for Lubuntu because there are a few differences in software and I'm an avid Lubuntu user but, if need be, I can make due with just the Ubuntu man-pages.

There are no differences in manpages between Lubuntu and Ubuntu. One of the points of becoming a recognized flavour is using the same repositories as Ubuntu, so the software is identical, it's only the starting points that differ.

Also, http://manpages.ubuntu.com suffers from a bug where identically named manpages from different packages aren't distinguished - the manpages of the last package read show up.

Instead of hammering the manpages site, hammer the repositories.

Get a list of manpages, for, say, the binary-amd64 architecture (should be identical to the others):

mkdir temp
cd temp
curl http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/wily/Contents-amd64.gz | 
  gunzip | 
  grep 'share/man' |
  sed 's/.* //;s/,/\n/g' | 
  awk -F/ '{print $NF}' | 
  sort -u > packages.txt
while IFS= read -r package
do
    apt-get download "$package"
    dpkg-deb --fsys-tarfile "$package"*.deb | tar x ./usr/share/man
    mkdir "$package"-manpages
    find ./usr/share/man/man* -type f -exec mv -t "$package"-manpages {} +
    rm "$package"*.deb
    for page in "$package"-manpages/*
    do
        man -t "$page" | ps2pdf - > "$page".pdf
    done
done < packages.txt

If course, this is going to consume an insane amount of bandwidth - the repository servers are used to it, the question is: is your network upto the task?