man page is the documentation for software programs in *nix operating systems. To get printouts of the man pages of certain packages, we would normally go online and use the browser as a medium. However, we can use the following command-line options, to do the same.
To convert man pages of various Linux commands into a printable text file, use the following command:
$ man foo > man.txt
We can simply take a printout of the man.txt file, but the above step also copies unnecessary junk characters. In order to avoid this, the following command can be used.
$ man man | col -b > man.txt
Save the man page to text or pdf file
To convert man pages of various Linux commands into a pdf file, use the following command:
$ man -t man| ps2pdf -> man.pdf
In the above command, the output of ‘man -t man’ is piped to the ps2pdf program, which is then stored as man.pdf. This man.pdf file can be used like any other PDF file.
In fact, by this way we can prepare our own man page book ;).
Quite handy, right ?
Extract Text from Protected PDF File. « Ramani's blog