man page editor (txt/html to man converter)

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

Hi,

I need to create man pages,
either from html markup or text.

Ideally a commandline based utility to do the conversion would be good.

Reason being, this will be scripted for depot creation.

I've got txt2man from the porting archive, but it return errors when converting - (even it's own help page)

Later,
Bill

[Tore_1]

Hi, there is a tool which is called viman which you can use. I think you can find it a freshmeat.

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Bill


man | col -b

Will struip out the formatting

So:_

man command | col -b > file.txt


HTH

Paula

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell]

Bill


man | col -b

Will strip out the formatting

So:_

man command | col -b > file.txt


HTH

Paula

[Ralph Grothe]

Bill,

I'd suggest you use Perl to this end, and especially Perl's Plain Old Documentation (aka POD).

If you have a Perl version >= 5.003 installed type at the shell
(beware, if you are root, and have a Perl >= 5.6 it won't let you execute perldoc as root, because there was an exploit, so do a su to another user before, or use the -U flag)

$ perldoc perldoc

and read the tutorial to POD's very straight forward kind of mark-up in

$ perldoc perlpod

From this you will learn the POD's mark-up tags in abt. half an hour.

Then you may easily write all your docs in POD and let perldoc do the nroff formatting (e.g. typical manpage layout with highlighting etc.)
There are even lots of Perl tools for conversion of POD to almost any format (e.g. html, roff, ps etc.)

HTH

Ralph

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

ping..
still no bunny answer..
Did anyone look at txt2man from the porting archive..

I'm finding recently that a lot of stuff there just doesn't work.

Later,
Bill

[Shannon Petry]

Bill,

I have not seen anything like you need. I usually end up making my own and fudging the formatting from other man pages. I know, not a good answer, but...

You can put plain text as man pages, and last I checked anyway they are displayed in that format. Just make sure that they have the correct filename/extension in a current man page directory or define MANPATH to include your own.

HTML would take a bit more work, as you have to strip the HTML tags off to get text, or translate. Sorry, but noone wants to get to man from html any more, but I have some awsome cgi man to html converters ;)

Regards,
Shannon