Re: HTML to man page (Unix)

[Michael Smith <smith -at- io -dot- com>]

Ted Rainey <trainey -at- novadigm -dot- com> writes:

> Has anyone come across a utility that will convert HTML docs (or any docs)
> into man page formats for Unix systems.

I don't know of any system for converting HTML to man format, but
there are at least a couple of systems for generating it from DocBook
SGML/XML. The best I've come across is Steve Cheng's docbook2manxml,
which is part of his DocBook2X package:

  http://docbook2x.sourceforge.net/

You can use it to generate both roff man pages and TeXinfo files. It's
cross-platform, but requires Perl and some additional Perl modules:

  http://docbook2x.sourceforge.net/dependencies.html

It's probably easier to set up on a Linux or other UNIX system than it
is to set up on Windows, but it is usable on Windows as well.

To use it, you need to author or convert your content to DocBook XML.

DocBook has an element hierarchy (called Refentry) that's specially
designed for marking up content for reference pages (aka man page).
Once you've got your content in DocBook, you can generate not just the
man pages from it, but also HTML/dHTML, PDF, Microsoft HTML Help,
Javahelp, RTF, LaTeX...

One current limitation of docbook2manxml is that it can't correctly
convert tables, so you can't have tables in your DocBook source.

One of the Developers on the DocBook Open Repository projects, Martijn
van Beers, is working on creating a set of DocBook-to-man XSLT
stylesheets, but I'm not sure how far along he is with those yet.

HTH,

  --Mike Smith  smith -at- xml-doc -dot- org

-- 
Michael Smith, Tokyo, Japan    http://sideshowbarker.net
&#x30DE;&#x30A4;&#x30AF;

Winter under cultivation
Is as arable as Spring.

  --Emily Dickinson (1707)     http://www.logopoeia.com/ed/




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