[lug] man page creation

Chris Riddoch socket at peakpeak.com
Thu Nov 30 13:08:05 MST 2000


"D. Stimits" <stimits at idcomm.com> writes:

> I was asked about the creation of man pages based on html pages. I know
> there are a lot of conversion utilities out there, and found several for
> going the reverse route and creating html from man pages. In terms of
> going TO man pages, I found references to a number of conversions, such
> as latex to man, and the docbook sgml type conversions, but no html.
> 
> Does anyone here know of a converter from html to create a new man page?
> 
> D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

The problem is, HTML (despite its similarity to other SGML-based
things) describes layout and appearance instead of structure.  You
can't trust that everything that's italic is a reference or a term, or
that anything in fixed-width font is a command line.

If you just want to get the superficial appearance of the manpage
copied to manpage format, I suppose it wouldn't be impossible to write
a converter in perl or python.  Maybe somebody's done it, I've
personally not seen such a beast.

If it were me, though, and it weren't very many HTML pages I was
interested in converting, I'd probably take the HTML page into $EDITOR
and turn it into a Docbook RefEntry by hand, and use the SGML tools to
generate the manpage.  If you're interested in doing that, I can give
you a few pointers off the list.

Better to author in something that tells you about the structure of
the language than to try to convert from one layout-description to
another, in my humble opinion.  So if your goal is just to make
manpages in the first place, instead of having existing HTML pages to
mess with, it's better to use the LaTeX or Docbook systems.

</rant>

--
Chris Riddoch
socket at peakpeak.com




More information about the LUG mailing list