PolyglotMan(1)                                                General Commands Manual                                               PolyglotMan(1)

NAME

       PolyglotMan,  rman  -  reverse compile man pages from formatted form to a number of source formats: ASCII, roff, TkMan, Tk, Sections, HTML,
       SGML, MIME, LaTeX, LaTeX2e, RTF, POD.

SYNOPSIS

       rman [ options ] [ file ]

DESCRIPTION

       Up-to-date instructions can be found at http://polyglotman.sourceforge.net/rman.html

       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; mnemoni-
       cally, 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  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/share/man/man1/ls.1, first cd into /usr/share/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), XML, 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/ .

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 parameters, and then specify other options.

       -f|--filter <ASCII|roff|TkMan|Tk|Sections|HTML|XML|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 XML modes this sets the URL form by which to retrieve other man pages. The string can use two supplied parame-
                      ters: 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 fol-
                      lowed by a left parenthesis, then one of the valid volumes, and ends with optional other characters and then a right  paren-
                      thesis--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.

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
       filter tries to intuit the original [tn]roff directives, which can then be recompiled by [tn]roff.

   TkMan
       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/

   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 out-
       put  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.

   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 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.

   XML
       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
       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 them better with NeXT's documentation system.  Maybe  NeXT
       has its 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 subsec-
       tions 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/share/man/html .
       Generate these one-by-one with the following form:
       rman -f html -r 'http:/usr/share/man/html/%s.%s.html' /usr/share/man/cat1/ls.1 > /usr/share/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/share/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(1) applies its own idea of formatting for man pages, which can confuse PolyglotMan . Bypass woman  by passing the for-
       matted 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 flavor 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: 1998/07/13 09:47:28 $

                                                                                                                                    PolyglotMan(1)