Re: info to man

[David Z Maze <dmaze@debian.org>]

Michael P Soulier <michael.soulier@home.com> writes:
MPS> Is there a decent way to translate from info to man? I personally
MPS> hate info pages, and I'd like to convert and contribute some
MPS> converted info documentation. I greatly prefer man.

This probably wouldn't be that wonderful in the general case.  Info
documentation tends to be more along the lines of "books", whereas man
pages are "quick reference cards".

MPS> I know there are tools to convert info and man to html, and
MPS> that's a decent format when read with lynx. Maybe the answer
MPS> would be to convert all to html, and then write a front-end for
MPS> lynx so I could type (help <page>) and it would invoke lynx on
MPS> the appropriate page.
MPS> 
MPS> Any information on the above?

You might install dwww, which (in combination with a Web server) lets
you read ~all of your locally installed documentation as Web pages.
It integrates nicely with info-to-HTML and man-to-HTML converters (I
forget which).  You can then read things through menus, or if you
wanted, you could write a wrapper like

#!/bin/sh
exec lynx http://localhost/cgi-bin/dwww?search=$1

HTH,

-- 
David Maze         dmaze@debian.org      http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell