Paginate man pages

Question

Different systems render man pages differently. Some paginated the pages by default, some don't. How can I control the pagination behaviour?

And how can I configure the page height (in lines) when pagination is enabled?

For example, on Solaris 10, when I view man pages in the terminal (e.g. man man) they are paginated like this:

User Commands                                              man(1)
...
SunOS 5.10          Last change: 29 Apr 2010                    1

User Commands                                              man(1)
...
SunOS 5.10          Last change: 29 Apr 2010                    2
...

On Fedora Linux the same call just renders one big page:

MAN(1)                        Manual pager utils                        MAN(1)
...
2.7.6.1                           2016-12-12                            MAN(1)

Answer 1

The groff documentation describes several options that can be used to control pagination, including -rCR=0 to disable the default single-page behaviour in nroff mode. This can be set using the MANROFFOPT environment variable.

I haven't found a way to control the page length, short of injecting a .pl request into the nroff input stream, and in the absence of that it seems to be effectively a fixed value. It might be worthwhile for man to gain an option to enable pagination and set the page length based on the terminal size ...