I tried converting some man pages to plain text files. But when I open the file, many of the words have unnecessary repeating characters.
For example doing man awk > awk.txt changes the sections in the awk.txt file from:
I thought this would be a simple task. Why does this happen?
Man pages contain formating information (for instance to indicate if some words should be bold). Consequently, some characters may appear repeated when redirecting the output in a file.
You may want to try:
man awk | col -b > awk.txt
What col is doing:
col — filter reverse line feeds from input
SYNOPSIS
col [-bfhpx] [-l num]
DESCRIPTION
The col utility filters out reverse (and half reverse) line feeds so that the output is in the correct order with only forward and half forward line feeds, and replaces white-space characters with tabs where possible. This can be useful in processing the output of nroff(1) and tbl(1).
The col utility reads from the standard input and writes to the standard output.
The options are as follows:
-b Do not output any backspaces, printing only the last character written to each column position.