rman
PolyglotMan(1) PolyglotMan(1)
NAME
PolyglotMan, rman - reverse compile man pages from formatted form to a
number of source formats
SYNOPSIS
rman [ options ] [ file ]
DESCRIPTION
PolyglotMan takes man pages from most of the popular flavors of UNIX
and transforms them into any of a number of text source formats. Poly-
glotMan was formerly known as RosettaMan. The name of the binary is
still called rman , for scripts that depend on that name; mnemoni-
cally, 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 Poly-
glotMan 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 for-
mats.
The latest version of PolyglotMan is always available from
ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/rman.tar.Z .
OPTIONS
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 parame-
ters, and then specify other options.
-f|--filter <ASCII|roff|TkMan|Tk|Sec-
tions|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 man-
ual 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 sec-
tion titles. This can cause problems on some UNIX fla-
vors.
-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 para-
graphs. 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 charac-
ters used, set tabstops every # columns. Defaults to
8.
NOTES ON FILTER TYPES
ROFF
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
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/
Tk
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 <tex-
twidget> insert end <text> . This format should be relatively easily
parsable by other programs that want both the text and the tags. Also
see ASCII.
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.
Sections
Dumps section and (optionally) subsection titles. This might be useful
for another program that processes man pages.
HTML
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.
SGML
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
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.
LaTeX and LaTeX2e
Why not?
RTF
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.
PostScript and FrameMaker
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.
EXAMPLES
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 sub-
sections 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 pre-
generated HTML versions of man pages stored in /usr/man/html . Gener-
ate 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.
BUGS/INCOMPATIBILITIES
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.
SEE ALSO
tkman(1) , xman(1) , man(1) , man(7) or man(5) depending on your fla-
vor of UNIX
AUTHOR
PolyglotMan
by Thomas A. Phelps ( phelps@ACM.org )
developed at the
University of California, Berkeley
Computer Science Division
Manual page last updated on $Date$
PolyglotMan(1)
