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PolyglotMan, rman - reverse compile man pages from formatted form to
a number of source formats
rman [ options ] [ file ]
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/man/man1/ls.1, first cd into /usr/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), SGML, 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/
.
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|SGML|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 SGML 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.
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(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/
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.
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.
Dumps section and (optionally)
subsection titles. This might be useful for another program that processes
man pages.
With a simple extention 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.
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
(Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) as defined by RFC 1563, good for
consumption by MIME-aware e-mailers or as Emacs (>=19.29) enriched documents.
Why not?
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.
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.
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/man/html . Generate these one-by-one with the following
form:
rman -f html -r ’http:/usr/man/html/%s.%s.html’
/usr/man/cat1/ls.1 > /usr/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/man/cat1/ls.1
when generating HTML.
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.
tkman(1)
, xman(1)
, man(1)
, man(7)
or man(5)
depending on your
flavor of UNIX
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 $ (with text patch for Debian)
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