How to get a text output of a man page?
man ls | col -b. The “col -b” formats the man page to plain text. (It removes control chars. (Control chars are used to make text bold, etc.)).
How to read a non-compressed man page without the “man” command?
nroff -man n43921.man | col -b
This is convenient when you need to read a man-page file once without adding the dir to your $MANPATH.
How to read a compressed man page without the “man” command?
cat n43921.1 | compress -cd - | nroff -man | col -b
How to read a unformatted man page?
a possible solution: nroff -man ftpshut.8
The “man” command is essentially nroff -e -man file_name | more -s.