discuss: Man pages converted to HTML
Subject:
Re: [discuss] Man pages converted to HTML
From:
David Lawyer ####@####.####
Date:
28 May 2007 07:56:18 -0000
Message-Id: <20070528075631.GC1765@davespc>
Would you be willing to help LDP by setting up and maintaining a
distribution of manpages on the LDP website? I think that LDP should
provide them in both HTML and groff (troff) just like we supply HOWTOs
in plain text and html. HTML doesn't help much with the existing man
pages since they don't contain links (but should!).
LDP once started off on a project to unify documentation, but never
reached the point of any concrete proposal. One problem is the info
documentation (texinfo) which has internal links but is not html.
These pages, like the man pages, are constantly being revised in the
texinfo format.
On Tue, May 22, 2007 at 07:15:32PM -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> When, the other day, I went looking for HTML-formatted Linux man pages, all
> that I found were a couple of sites that offered mildly dressed-up nroff
> output. The result looked somewhat bland to me, and a bit hard on the eyes.
> I didn't look extensively, but I couldn't find any obvious links to
> download the HTML-formatted collections for offline browsing.
>
> That seemed to me like a rather sad state of affairs, so I'm happy to
> report a modest accomplishment. Converting ancient troff to modern,
I find the manpages in troff format quite readable.
> readable HTML, is certainly not easy, but it turned out to be generally
> doable. On http://manpages.courier-mta.org you'll find the latest version
> of LDP's core man page set, as browsable HTML or a downloadable tarball
> (please use a torrent).
>
> Instead of LDP's stock section 1 collection, I've replaced it with man
> pages from the most recent version of util-linux and GNU coreutils, to get
> a better match for what you'd find in most distros. I'll try to convert
> other sets of man pages, as time permits. I've temporarily omitted 3p,
> since Posix's copyright file seems to require inclusion of the original
> 'roff source in any derivative work. I'll need to figure out how to square
> away that requirement, in my build scripts, first.
>
David Lawyer
