cmd:col 

OPTIONS

-b        Assume that the output device in use is not  capa-
          ble  of backspacing.  In this case, if two or more
          characters are to appear in the same  place,  only
          the last one read will be output.
-x         Unless -x is used, all blank characters in the
 input will be converted to tab characters wherever possible.

Unix Man page 

> Recently, I downloaded a free program but the documents are in man page
> format.
> How can I read this file using man command or is there any other way to
> convert the man page format to a normal text file?

Option 1 

groff -Tascii -man man_page > out_file

Option 2 

man <command Name> | col -b > command_name.txt

documented on: 01-05-99

man 

:i can't seem
:to strip out the control (^) characters... it comes out like:
:
:     man [ - ] [ -adFlrt ] [ -M _^Hp_^Ha_^Ht_^Hh ] etc etc...
:

If you're lucky:

% man -t manpage

If you're almost lucky:

% man -t manpage | lpr

If you're semi-lucky:

% troff /usr/man/man?/manpage.?

If it really really sucks to be you:

% man manpage | col -b | lpr

—tom

MAN Page Editor for Linux? 

Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 05:00:58 GMT

Juha Siltala wrote:

> > Can anyone out here recommend a MAN page editor for Linux, preferably
> > with a GUI editor based on KDE or Gnome?
>
> I don't know if either these are recommendable or not, but this is all I
> could find in less than 5 seconds:
>
> juha@marvin ~ >sudo apt-cache search manedit
> gmanedit - GTK+/GNOME Man pages editor
> manedit - A GTK+-based Enhanced ManPage Editor

Thanks for the information and I found it through a search on FreshMeat site. I downloaded the source, compiled, RPM packaged, installed the RPM binary package, and am now happily using it even though it is not a WYSIWYG editor … :)

MAN Page Editor for Linux? 

I have used Manedit and found it quite good. I also updated several things in its help page and found the people involved with it most helpfull.

Cheers

Dave

cmd:rman, PolyglotMan 

Usage 

generate single file 
rman -f html -r '%s.%s.html' man_file > man_file.htm

Info 

Description

from ANNOUNCE-rman 

PolyglotMan (nee RosettaMan) is a filter for UNIX manual pages. It takes as input man pages for a variety of UNIX flavors and produces as output a variety of file formats.

Source 

The home location for PolyglotMan is ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu//ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/ (this is a softlink to the latest numbered version).

ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu//ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/rman-3.0.8.tar.Z — (1999.10.28 Thu)

build 

From README-rman 

Set BINDIR in the Makefile to where you keep your binaries and MANDIR to where you keep your man pages (in their source form). (If you're using PolyglotMan with TkMan, BINDIR needs to be a component of your bin PATH.)

After properly editing the Makefile, type `make install'.

change 

add the following two lines:

BINDIR = ${HOME}/local/bin
MANDIR = ${HOME}/local/man/man1
build 
make

Test run 

$ rman -v
PolyglotMan v3.0.8 of $Date: 1999/08/10 00:41:55 $
rman -f html -r '%s.%s.html' ~/local/man/man1/rman.1

Installation 

$ make install
rm -f /home/users/tongsun/local/bin/rman
cp rman /home/users/tongsun/local/bin
rm -f /home/users/tongsun/local/man/man1/rman.1
cp rman.1 /home/users/tongsun/local/man/man1

Run 

rman -f html -r '%s.%s.html' ~/local/man/man1/rman.1

documented on: 2003.11.23 Sun

Writting Man Page 

just type "man 7 man" and read it.

Here's a template-cum-tutorial:

—tom Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com>

 .TH NAME SECTION
 .\" NAME should be all caps, SECTION should be 1-8, maybe w/ subsection
 .\" other parms are allowed: see man(7), man(1)
 .SH NAME
 foo, bar \- programs to do something
 .SH SYNOPSIS
 a short usage summary
 .SH DESCRIPTION
 long drawn out discussion of the program.  it's a good idea
 to break this up into subsections using the .SS macros, like
 these:
 .SS "A Sample Subection"
 .SS "Yet Another Sample Subection"
 .SH OPTIONS
 Some people make this separate from the description.
 .SH "RETURN VALUE"
 What the program or function returns if successful.
 .SH ERRORS
 Return codes, either exit status or errno settings.
 .SH EXAMPLES
 give some example uses of the program
 .SH ENVIRONMENT
 envariables this program might care about
 .SH FILES
 all files used by the program. typical usage is like this:
 .br
 .nf
 .\" set tabstop to longest possible filename, plus a wee bit
 .ta \w'/usr/lib/perl/getopts.pl   'u
 \fI/usr/man\fR default man tree
 \fI/usr/man/man*/*.*\fR unformatted (nroff source) man pages
 .SH "SEE ALSO"
 .\" Always quote multiple words for .SH
 other man pages to check out, like man(1), man(7), makewhatis(8), catman(8)
 .SH NOTES
 miscellaneous commentary
 .SH CAVEATS
 things to take special care with.  sometimes called WARNINGS.
 .SH DIAGNOSTICS
 all the possible error messages the program can print out, and
 what they mean.
 .SH BUGS
 things that are broken or just don't work quite right.
 .SH RESTRICTIONS
 bugs you don't plan to fix :-)
 .SH AUTHOR
 who wrote it (or AUTHORS if multiple)
 .SH HISTORY
 programs derived from other sources sometimes have this.

documented on: Tue 06-01-99 17:49:30