This is not really a programming question, but it starts there:

I just wrote a simple GUI man page viewer (in C/gtk2) using popen("man [page] | col -b", "r"). This works fine except with about 10% of pages I get "No manual page for page...". I actually took out my stock man rpm and installed the latest man-db from source, but it does the same thing.

Anyway, I am at a loss as to where to start looking for the solution, and am hoping somewhat else has encountered the problem before.[solved later]

ps. if some brave person is interested in trying the viewer (which also allows you to save bookmarks and highlighting, etc.) the code is available for playtesting:
http://www.intergate.com/~halfcountplus/see
There's some brief description, screenshots, etc., but no makefile yet, so you have to compile using gcc...