Re: reformatting man pages at SIGWINCH

Ralph Corderoy
2023-04-11T09:20:33Z

Hi Branden,

> see man pages as they would have formatted for Western Electric
> Teletype machines, which printed to long spools of paper with 66 lines
> to the nominal page.

In case it isn't obvious, it was normal for teletypes and line printers
to print six lines per inch onto letter-height fan-fold paper perforated
every eleven inches giving 66 lines per real page, not nominal.

As long as the paper was positioned so it started printing just after a
perforation, the page breaks occurred over a perforation. To allow for
a bit of leeway, the page often started and ended with blank lines.

--
Cheers, Ralph.