Don't cry. Come sit by the fire and I'll tell you a little story.
Manual pages are stored in a markup language which is processed by the nroff program when you run man. They are often also compressed to preserve disk space.
The output of nroff is intended for display for terminals, which have strange ways of doing things like showing bold text. The heritage of this is quite interesting, going back to teletype machines where the output was literally printed onto paper. This is where these ^H characters come from. The ^H was the way the teletype was told to go back once space. Thus sending a^Ha would print an a character, go back one space and print another a character - this would make the a appear darker than other text - a simple way to get bold type without needing extra hardware! In a similar way, you could get an underlined
hello by sending h^H_e^H_l^H_l^H_o^H_ to the teletype.
Modern virtual terminal programs are a long way from the old teletype printers, but they still support this funny way of getting formatted text, and the manual system generally works pretty well... if it ain't broken don't fix it, right?
There have been several attempts to get rid of the manual system in unix-like OSes, I suspect in part because of it's antiquated mechanism. But it's so damn useful, and many people (me included) like the simplicity of simple named pages which aren't linked together in a hypertext glob.
Now your mplayer.1 file looks a little odd... it seems to be the output of nroff, as formatted for a terminal, which is unexpected because usually .1 files are the nroff input - the un-processed markup language.
It may be that you got the mplayer.1 file from catman directory. Catman is an attempt to speed up the manual system by doing the markup process once, and cacheing the results. the catman files are already in the format for terminal display, which sounds like your mplayer.1 file.
OK anyhow, the question I think you want to know the answer for is "how can I convert my mplayer.1 file to plain text without all this ^H stuff in it?", right?
The answer is one of those annoying things which I know I have successfully solved in the past after some difficulty finding a simple and elegant solution with man and/or nroff/groff, but now it eludes me.
If you use the GNU implementations of man and friends, and have lynx installed you can do this:
Code:
BROWSER='lynx -dump' man -H mplayer > mplayer.txt
...which will ask man to output in HTML format, and use lynx in text dump mode to display the page, we then use the shell to re-direct the output to mplayer.txt, which is a text version of the HTML manual page.
...and they all lived happily ever after.
