NAME ¶
PolyglotMan, rman - reverse compile man pages from formatted form to a number of
source formats: ASCII, roff, TkMan, Tk, Sections, HTML, SGML, MIME, LaTeX,
LaTeX2e, RTF, POD.
SYNOPSIS ¶
rman [
options ] [
file ]
DESCRIPTION ¶
Up-to-date instructions can be found at
http://polyglotman.sourceforge.net/rman.html
PolyglotMan takes man pages from most of the popular flavors of UNIX and
transforms them into any of a number of text source formats. PolyglotMan was
formerly known as RosettaMan. The name of the binary is still called
rman, for scripts that depend on that name; mnemonically, just think
"reverse man". Previously
PolyglotMan required pages
to be formatted by
nroff(1) prior to its processing. With version 3.0, it
prefers [tn]roff source and usually produces results that are better
yet. And source processing is the only way to translate tables. Source format
translation is not as mature as formatted, however, so try formatted
translation as a backup.
In parsing [tn]roff source, one could implement an arbitrarily large subset of
[tn]roff, which I did not and will not do, so the results can be off. I did
implement a significant subset of those used in man pages, however, including
tbl (but not eqn), if tests, and general macro definitions, so usually the
results look great. If they don't, format the page with nroff before sending
it to PolyglotMan. If PolyglotMan doesn't recognize a key macro used by a
large class of pages, however, e-mail me the source and a uuencoded
nroff-formatted page and I'll see what I can do. When running PolyglotMan with
man page source that includes or redirects to other [tn]roff source using the
.so (source or inclusion) macro, you should be in the parent directory of the
page, since pages are written with this assumption. For example, if you are
translating /usr/share/man/man1/ls.1, first cd into /usr/share/man.
PolyglotMan accepts man pages from: SunOS, Sun Solaris, Hewlett-Packard
HP-UX, AT&T System V, OSF/1 aka Digital UNIX, DEC Ultrix, SGI IRIX, Linux,
FreeBSD, SCO. Source processing works for: SunOS, Sun Solaris, Hewlett-Packard
HP-UX, AT&T System V, OSF/1 aka Digital UNIX, DEC Ultrix. It can produce
printable ASCII-only (control characters stripped), section headers-only, Tk,
TkMan, [tn]roff (traditional man page source), XML, HTML, MIME, LaTeX,
LaTeX2e, RTF, Perl 5 POD. A modular architecture permits easy addition of
additional output formats.
The latest version of PolyglotMan is available from
http://polyglotman.sourceforge.net/ .
OPTIONS ¶
The following options should not be used with any others and exit PolyglotMan
without processing any input.
- -h|--help
- Show list of command line options and exit.
- -v|--version
- Show version number and exit.
You should specify the filter first, as this sets a number of
parameters, and then specify other options.
- -f|--filter
<ASCII|roff|TkMan|Tk|Sections|HTML|XML|MIME|LaTeX|LaTeX2e|RTF|POD>
- Set the output filter. Defaults to ASCII.
- -S|--source
- PolyglotMan tries to automatically determine whether its
input is source or formatted; use this option to declare source
input.
- -F|--format|--formatted
- PolyglotMan tries to automatically determine whether its
input is source or formatted; use this option to declare formatted
input.
- -l|--title printf-string
- In HTML mode this sets the <TITLE> of the man pages,
given the same parameters as -r .
- -r|--reference|--manref printf-string
- In HTML and XML modes this sets the URL form by which to
retrieve other man pages. The string can use two supplied parameters: the
man page name and its section. (See the Examples section.) If the string
is null (as if set from a shell by "-r ''"), `-' or `off', then
man page references will not be HREFs, just set in italics. If your printf
supports XPG3 positions specifier, this can be quite flexible.
- -V|--volumes <colon-separated list>
- Set the list of valid volumes to check against when looking
for cross-references to other man pages. Defaults to
1:2:3:4:5:6:7:8:9:o:l:n:p (volume names can be multicharacter). If
an non-whitespace string in the page is immediately followed by a left
parenthesis, then one of the valid volumes, and ends with optional other
characters and then a right parenthesis--then that string is reported as a
reference to another manual page. If this -V string starts with an equals
sign, then no optional characters are allowed between the match to the
list of valids and the right parenthesis. (This option is needed for SCO
UNIX.)
The following options apply only when formatted pages are given as input. They
do not apply to or are always handled correctly with the source.
- -b|--subsections
- Try to recognize subsection titles in addition to section
titles. This can cause problems on some UNIX flavors.
- -K|--nobreak
- Indicate manual pages don't have page breaks, so don't look
for footers and headers around them. (Older nroff -man macros always put
in page breaks, but lately some vendors have realized that printouts are
made through troff(1), whereas nroff -man is used to format pages for
reading on screen, and so have eliminated page breaks.) PolyglotMan
usually gets this right even without this flag.
- -k|--keep
- Keep headers and footers, as a canonical report at the end
of the page. changeleft Move changebars, such as those found in the Tcl/Tk
manual pages, to the left. --> notaggressive Disable aggressive
man page parsing. Aggressive manual, which is on by default, page parsing
elides headers and footers, identifies sections and more. -->
- -n|--name name
- Set name of man page (used in roff format). If the filename
is given in the form " name . section ", the name
and section are automatically determined. If the page is being parsed from
[tn]roff source and it has a .TH line, this information is extracted from
that line.
- -p|--paragraph
- paragraph mode toggle. The filter determines whether lines
should be linebroken as they were by nroff, or whether lines should be
flowed together into paragraphs. Mainly for internal use.
- -s|section #
- Set volume (aka section) number of man page (used in roff
format). tables Turn on aggressive table parsing. -->
- -t|--tabstops #
- For those macros sets that use tabs in place of spaces
where possible in order to reduce the number of characters used, set
tabstops every # columns. Defaults to 8.
NOTES ON FILTER TYPES ¶
ROFF ¶
Some flavors of UNIX ship man page without [tn]roff source, making one's laser
printer little more than a laser-powered daisy wheel. This filter tries to
intuit the original [tn]roff directives, which can then be recompiled by
[tn]roff.
TkMan ¶
TkMan(1), a hypertext man page browser, uses
PolyglotMan to show man
pages without the (usually) useless headers and footers on each page. It also
collects section and (optionally) subsection heads for direct access from a
pulldown menu. TkMan and Tcl/Tk, the toolkit in which it's written, are
available via anonymous ftp from
ftp://ftp.smli.com/pub/tcl/
Tk ¶
This option outputs the text in a series of Tcl lists consisting of text-tags
pairs, where tag names roughly correspond to HTML. This output can be inserted
into a Tk text widget by doing an
eval <textwidget> insert
end <text> . This format should be relatively easily parsible by
other programs that want both the text and the tags. See also ASCII.
ASCII ¶
When printed on a line printer, man pages try to produce special text effects by
overstriking characters with themselves (to produce bold) and underscores
(underlining). Other text processing software, such as text editors,
searchers, and indexers, must counteract this. The ASCII filter strips away
this formatting. Piping nroff output through
col -b also strips away
this formatting, but it leaves behind unsightly page headers and footers. Also
see Tk.
Sections ¶
Dumps section and (optionally) subsection titles. This might be useful for
another program that processes man pages.
HTML ¶
With a simple extension to a HTTP server for Mosaic(1) or other World Wide Web
browser,
PolyglotMan can produce high quality HTML on the fly. Several
such extensions and pointers to several others are included in
PolyglotMan
's
contrib directory.
XML ¶
This is appoaching the Docbook DTD, but I'm hoping that someone with a real
interest in this will polish the tags generated. Try it to see how close the
tags are now.
MIME ¶
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) as defined by RFC 1563, good for
consumption by MIME-aware e-mailers or as Emacs (>=19.29) enriched
documents.
LaTeX and LaTeX2e ¶
Why not?
RTF ¶
Use output on Mac or NeXT or whatever. Maybe take random man pages and integrate
them better with NeXT's documentation system. Maybe NeXT has its own man page
macros that do this.
PostScript and FrameMaker ¶
To produce PostScript, use
groff or
psroff . To produce
FrameMaker MIF, use FrameMaker's builtin filter. In both cases you need
[tn]roff source, so if you only have a formatted version of the manual
page, use
PolyglotMan 's roff filter first.
EXAMPLES ¶
To convert the
formatted man page named
ls.1 back into [tn]roff
source form:
rman -f roff /usr/local/man/cat1/ls.1 > /usr/local/man/man1/ls.1
Long man pages are often compressed to conserve space (compression is especially
effective on formatted man pages as many of the characters are spaces). As it
is a long man page, it probably has subsections, which we try to separate out
(some macro sets don't distinguish subsections well enough for
PolyglotMan
to detect them). Let's convert this to LaTeX format:
pcat /usr/catman/a_man/cat1/automount.z | rman -b -n automount -s 1 -f
latex > automount.man
Alternatively,
man 1 automount | rman -b -n automount -s 1 -f latex
> automount.man
For HTML/Mosaic users,
PolyglotMan can, without modification of the
source code, produce HTML links that point to other HTML man pages either
pregenerated or generated on the fly. First let's assume pregenerated HTML
versions of man pages stored in
/usr/share/man/html . Generate these
one-by-one with the following form:
rman -f html -r 'http:/usr/share/man/html/%s.%s.html'
/usr/share/man/cat1/ls.1 > /usr/share/man/html/ls.1.html
If you've extended your HTML client to generate HTML on the fly you should use
something like:
rman -f html -r 'http:~/bin/man2html?%s:%s' /usr/share/man/cat1/ls.1
when generating HTML.
BUGS/INCOMPATIBILITIES ¶
PolyglotMan is not perfect in all cases, but it usually does a good job,
and in any case reduces the problem of converting man pages to light editing.
Tables in formatted pages, especially H-P's, aren't handled very well. Be sure
to pass in source for the page to recognize tables.
The man pager
woman(1) applies its own idea of formatting for man pages,
which can confuse
PolyglotMan . Bypass
woman by passing
the formatted manual page text directly into
PolyglotMan .
The [tn]roff output format uses fB to turn on boldface. If your macro set
requires .B, you'll have to a postprocess the
PolyglotMan output.
SEE ALSO ¶
tkman(1) ,
xman(1) ,
man(1) ,
man(7) or
man(5)
depending on your flavor of UNIX
AUTHOR ¶
PolyglotMan
by Thomas A. Phelps (
phelps@ACM.org )
developed at the
University of California, Berkeley
Computer Science Division
Manual page last updated on $Date: 1998/07/13 09:47:28 $