[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
[Groff] Re: Bugs in groff
From: |
Werner LEMBERG |
Subject: |
[Groff] Re: Bugs in groff |
Date: |
Thu, 16 Sep 1999 09:45:08 GMT |
I have a couple questions for you, though, that aren't exactly
about the program. First thing, is there a easy way using groff to
get the system manual pages into HTML?
There is an awk script floating about that someone has put together
that can do this - but it kind of does it after-the-fact and the
man pages come out looking something like a html-ized version of
the terminal man pages. What I'd really like is some way to take
the formatted input and get html, preserving the layout. I tried
something like cat man.1 | groff -Thtml and I get html out all
right but the formatting is awful.
The call would be rather
cat man.1 | groff -man -Thtml > man.html
This driver is work in progress and still has a lot of bugs. But
eventually it should do what you want. Bug fixes are highly welcome.
For the moment, you may also try unroff:
http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~net/unroff/unroff.html
The other question I had is that I want to write a man page for a
program, and I was wondering if there was a easier way of doing it
than using a template and vi. I've done it that way before and the
man page that results is fine, but I really wonder if the original
intent of the Unix document formatting system was to have people
key in the codes by hand. Particularly with X-windows out for as
long as it is, certainly there was something that was included at
one time. I remember reading something about a "documentors
workbench" that AT&T used to include with their source - but Sun
doesn't seem to include anything like that nor does FreeBSD.
Good question. You may try the CTAN archives (say `finger
address@hidden' to get a list of mirrors) to search for a
latex2troff converter; then you could use e.g. LyX...
Specific for writing groff I don't know an integrated environment for
doing this.
Today with the emphasis on html it seems that everyone is looking
at groff and the utilities that come with it as a way of getting
"legacy" stuff into html, and it seems like all new documentation
is in html. The problem with that is that html only looks good on
a web browser, and there is no easy way (that I can tell) to go
"backwards" in other words take html and get it back into mandoc
format or something like that.
Another possibility is to write your documentation with texinfo. In
my SuSE distribution I have modules like texi2dvi, texi2html,
texi2roff, and texi2pdf.
Werner
- [Groff] Re: Bugs in groff,
Werner LEMBERG <=
[Groff] Re: Bugs in groff, Werner LEMBERG, 1999/09/19