RE: Man pages to PDF or RTF?

[(Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk>]

On 17-Nov-01 Rafe B. wrote:
> Is there a windoze util that will convert 
> Linux man pages to RTF or PDF or Postscript?
> 
> Specifically, what is the format of man pages?
> TeX/roff /troff/other ???  Is there a 
> HOWTO for man-page format (There must also 
> be a nifty indexing scheme, right?)
> 
> I really want printable files.  I know I can 
> find the man pages in HTML format at many 
> different websites -- that's not the point.

Don't bother with Windows. Use the "-T<device>"
option to 'man' (this passes the option to 'groff').
The primary (source) format of man pages is that
of 'troff' source text, to be formatted using the
"-man" option to include the "tmac.an" macros
(don't worry, 'man' looks after all that).

So, if you want PostScript output, try (for example)

  man -Tps ls > man_ls.ps

and you will have the man page for 'ls' in PostScript
(view it with say 'gv' or print it as a PS file).

You can then convert it to PDF with ps2pdf (part of
'ghostscript').

Also, if you want DVI output, you could use "-Tdvi"
instead.

Hope this helps,
Ted.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972
Date: 17-Nov-01                                       Time: 17:08:14
------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------