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Asked: 2017-10-07 06:45:51 +0800 CST

Is there a way to print info/man pages to PDF?

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I would like to see info or man pages in PDF format so the formatting displays correctly. I see texi file can be converted (with texi2pdf) but I don't find any texi files with locate. In this case, I'm interested in the Gpg2 info page.

command-line

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer
    i=gpg2; info $i | aha | wkhtmltopdf - $i.pdf

    creates a decent PDF file.

    LibreOffice is also able to convert to PDF:

    i=gpg2; info $i > $i && libreoffice --convert-to pdf $i && rm $i

    The output can compete with the above solution in my opinion.

    Also there's enscript which offers interesting formatting options (seeman enscript):

    i=gpg2; info $i > $i; enscript -B -o $i.ps $i; ps2pdf $i.ps $i.pdf && rm $i{,.ps}

    info gpg2 | lp -d PDF

    makes use of CUPS PDF (you might need to install the cups-pdf package first) to print a PDF file in ~/PDF/ – but it's not as fancy.

    i=gpg2; info -ao $i.pdf $i

    also works, but the output is plain ugly.

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  2. Others have already answered the question of how to convert info pages to PDF, so I'll cover man pages (the original and best online documentation!).

    On most modern Unix systems you can convert man pages to PDF just by using the -Tpdf option to man, but be aware that it will output to stdout so you'll need to redirect it:

    man -Tpdf man > manpage.pdf

    If, for any reason, your installed version of troff/groff (the formatting engine behind man pages) doesn't support direct PDF output then you can use ps2pdf, part of Ghostscript:

    man -Tps man | ps2pdf - manpage.pdf
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  3. You can get the .texi files from the source package:

    Use

    info -w Gpg2

    to find the .info file. In this case it's /usr/share/info/gnupg.info.gz.

    Now find the package that contains it:

    dpkg -S /usr/share/info/gnupg.info.gz

    This tells you the file is in the package gnupg. So download the source package:

    apt-get source gnupg

    apt-get tells you 

    Picking 'gnupg2' as source package instead of 'gnupg'

    and 

    dpkg-source: info: extracting gnupg2 in gnupg2-2.1.15

    So you should find the .texi files somewhere in the folder gnupg2-2.1.15/ (in this case they are in gnupg2-2.1.15/doc)

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