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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 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 use 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 always available from
ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/rman.tar.Z .
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 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 printout are made through troff,
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 filer tries to intuit
the original [tn]roff directives, which can then be recompiled by [tn]roff.
TkMan, a hypertext man page browser, uses PolyglotMan to show man
pages without the (usually) useless headers and footers on each pages.
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 parsable by other programs
that want both the text and the tags. Also see 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 extension to an HTTP
server for Mosaic 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 approaching
the Docbook DTD, but I'm hoping that someone 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 with NeXT's
documentation system better. Maybe NeXT has 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 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 ( [email protected] )
developed at the
University of California, Berkeley
Computer Science Division
Manual page last updated on $Date$
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