I'm making my first 'man' page and I'm using groff
to do it. However, when I "compile" it and view it, it only takes up a certain amount of columns in my terminal. I've tried viewing other man pages just in case and they stretch with the width of my terminal. For a visual exmaple:
---------------------------------------
| stuff(1) stuff(1) |
| |
| NAME |
| a tool to do stuff but |
| it isn't really working |
| |
| DESCRIPTION |
| yadadyadyadyadyadyadydy |
| segfwefwefwefwe |
| |
| srgswrgwrg |
---------------------------------------
… and so on, hopefully you get the idea. Most man pages take the full width.
Right now, after writing my man page in a text file (using the groff/nroff "syntax"), I make it like this:
groff -Tascii -man ./path/to/man | more
Best Answer
I checked what
groff
call is executed when I invokeman man
(which uses the full width):Looking for the
groff
call results in the following:Now I resize my xterm:
Thus, I assume that the
-rLL
and-rLT
arguments influence what terminal width is used bygroff
during compiling.