Re: Man pages to PDF or RTF?

[Simon Law <sfllaw@engmail.uwaterloo.ca>]

On Sat, 17 Nov 2001, Rafe B. wrote:

> 
> Hi.  Nother newbie windoze-user question.
> 
> I know this has been asked before, apologies 
> and thanks in advance.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Furthermore, I'd prefer to be printing the 
> man pages that live on my own debian installation, 
> not some generic page off the web.

	I can't think of a good way of doing this in Windows, unless you
have CygWin and GhostScript installed there.

	What I =think= you can do, is something like this...

Go to a directory on your GNU/Linux machine, where you want to place
your PDFs, say /home/rafe/manpages

	$ mkdir /home/rafe/manpages
	$ cd /home/rafe/manpages

Then, copy your man directory over, so that you can work with them.

	$ cp --recursive /usr/share/man/* .
	$ cp --recursive /usr/local/man/* .

Now, you have a mirror of your manpages.  Run through them and write out
your PDFs.  (I am using a bash script to do this, convert to your
favourite shell.)

	$ for i in `find .` ; do man -T -l $i | ps2pdf - > $i.pdf ; done

After this, you can delete your duplicate manpages, leaving only your
PDFs.

	$ find . -name *.gz -exec rm -f '{}' ';'

Now, for this to work, you will need groff, gs, and man-db installed.
Good luck!

Simon