HP-UX general support seems it is EOLd by end of this year. Extended, apparently very pricey, support will last till 2028.

It would be nice if anyone having still contacts they could ask if HPE would be willing to relax at least parts of HP-UX, like documentation and let achieve.org take them and let us occasionally check things as rererence how it was HP-UX.

It would be shame if all that work that they did documents were lost and unavailable general public later on.

Could it be possible to copy the man pages directly from a running distribution? I'm sure that's not allowed, but if it's otherwise disappearing forever...

Sure it is, if you have installation disks. Those are bog std ISO9660 with rock ridge -overlay extension. Which is just hidden file on CD top directory, which maps those silly uppercase ISO naming conventions with file version, and Linux should be able to mount them without problems.

I do not remember any more if those man files were preformatted and .Z compressed or were there the troff source files and "an" package also. Commercial unicen did have bad habit not to provide sources, so that could be the case.

But if someone have the CD:s then its not too hard to check I believe. Installation files could be packed somehow, like compressed and then cpio or tar inside. That's what I now think those would have been. But I can't remember for sure, its's bit over 25 years when I did work HP-UX last time.

And if I remember correctly HP did ship some printed manuals also with CD's. I have some kind of memory seeing some disks like that, but I never used those. We had paper manuals back then and which were then sent to customer as part of our product. Nor have I any idea which format those documents or whole document CD's would be. Postscript or PDF if we would be lucky, but it could be some proprietary format in worst case.