The netp?m-formats are frequently used for ad-hoc bitmap output, which means it is quite useful to have man pages like $ man 5 pbm around. This used to be the case in Gentoo for some older versions of netpbm, but at least as of the beforementioned version it is no longer so. Although the package installs tons of man pages, each contains rather useless text "Please refer to [some URL]" and the rather annoying message "Note that making the documentation available this way was a choice of the person who installed Netpbm on this system. It is also possible to install Netpbm such that you would simply see the documentation instead of the message you are reading now." I certainly did *not* want to install it that way! Reproducible: Always PLEASE install the offline documentation as it was the case in older versions of the package, or, even better, add a "doc" use flag for that purpose. Not everyone has online access all the time, and especially for data formats offline documentation is still useful.
the claim about it being a choice is misleading. what they're talking about is if the distribution installed their helper `manweb` command so that when you ran `man 5 pbm`, actually fetched the html page on the fly and rendered that instead of showing local content only. a local script is provided in the upstream repo to mangle the html pages into semi-manpages (some are kind of garbled), so i've included that in 10.58.00.
