> And it would be really nice if I could read man pages in the terminal in a proportional font, but preserving alignment etc.
Most man utilities can write postscript instead of directly to terminal. You can use that to achieve exactly what you want. Though this is not exactly in the terminal itself.
Is there a way to avoid Times New Roman? Some of the characters are pretty ambiguous. I remember, back when I used that command, I mixed up an l and a 1 for one of the flags.
To be pedantic, the font you're seeing isn't Times New Roman, but rather Times. They're similar, but there are subtle differences.
Yes, you can choose a default font. You need to change your /etc/man.conf, find the line that starts with TROFF, and add new options. For example, to use Palatino as the default font, you should additionally provide the option `-f P`. Then you'll get this output: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/845567/bash%281%29%20Pal...
Most man utilities can write postscript instead of directly to terminal. You can use that to achieve exactly what you want. Though this is not exactly in the terminal itself.
Example: I don't have zsh for comparison but on my OS X machine, running `man -t bash | open -f -a Preview` results in this: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/845567/bash%281%29.pdf