Does anyone know of a C library for processing man pages (they are in groff, i notice)?

Or, looking at this differently, if I go man man > man.txt I still get something that is not really viewable as plain text. A total guess, having never used any of the 'w' string functions: I'm seeing "wide' characters in the output (or are those just for foriegn alphabets)?

There are a few questions in here (i guess), but if you know anything useful about the topic please post.