man2html

Convert nroff output of man pages into html

Contributed by

Larry Philps

Obtained from

http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/man2html.doc.html

Restrictions

GNU Copyleft

Description

man2html takes formatted nroff in standard input (STDIN) and outputs the HTML to standard output (STDOUT). The formatted nroff output is surrounded with <PRE> tags with the following exceptions/additions:

• Section heads are wrapped in HTML header tags. See Section Head Map File for more information. This feature can be turned off with the -noheads command-line option.
• Overstriken words designated with the "<char><backspace><char>" sequences are wrapped in <STRONG> tags.
• Overstriken words designated with the "_<backspace><char>" sequences (ie. underlined words) are wrapped in <EM> tags.

man2html also does the following:

• Merges the multi-page formatted nroff into a single page. See Usage for information on how to tell man2html the page size and margin width/heights of the formatted nroff. Depagination can be turned off with the -nodepage command-line option.
• Creates links to other manpages if the -cgiurl command-line option is specified.

By default, man2html does not put a title, <TITLE>, in the HTML file. However, one can specify a title via the -title command-line option.

Productivity

Most man pages come as troff input, but our Everest man technology is designed around HTML. This allows those troff input files to be converted non-interactively.

Safety

Examined the Perl script

Work Planned

None

Verification

Take your favourite man pages, run it through gnroff -man then pipe that output into man2html. Look at the result with Mosaic.