Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
The solution you hit upon is a good one (certainly better than that of another answer, which proposed using non- groff tools to convert from text to PDF and back), but could be further reduced. The key point, as you noted, is disablement of the "continuous rendering" mode ("cR") that groff uses to format man pages for terminal devices. If the legacy line or dot matrix printer supports Latin-1 (possible, I suppose) or UTF-8 (unlikely, I'd guess), then you can produce text encoded for those character sets by substituting latin1 or utf8 , respectively, for ascii . Most importantly, you don't need to use the col command at all. You're already using -P -c and it works (so you must be using groff...
Full answer by TheNotoriousGBR: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/801862 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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