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PolyglotMan(1)							PolyglotMan(1)

NAME
       PolyglotMan,  rman - reverse compile man pages from formatted form to a
       number of source formats

SYNOPSIS
       rman [ options ] [ file ]

DESCRIPTION
       PolyglotMan  takes man pages from most of the popular flavors  of  UNIX
       and  transforms them into any of a number of text source formats. Poly‐
       glotMan was formerly known as RosettaMan. The name  of  the  binary  is
       still called rman , for scripts that depend on that name; mnemonically,
       just think "reverse man". Previously PolyglotMan	 required pages to  be
       formatted  by  nroff  prior  to	its  processing.  With version 3.0, it
       prefers [tn]roff source and usually produces results  that  are	better
       yet.  And source processing is the only way to translate tables. Source
       format translation is not as mature as formatted, however, so try  for‐
       matted translation as a backup.

       In  parsing  [tn]roff  source, one could implement an arbitrarily large
       subset of [tn]roff, which I did not and will not do, so the results can
       be off. I did implement a significant subset of those use in man pages,
       however, including tbl (but not eqn), if tests, and general macro defi‐
       nitions,	 so  usually the results look great. If they don't, format the
       page with nroff	before	sending	 it  to	 PolyglotMan.  If  PolyglotMan
       doesn't	recognize a key macro used by a large class of pages, however,
       e-mail me the source and a uuencoded nroff-formatted page and I'll  see
       what  I	can  do.  When	running	 PolyglotMan with man page source that
       includes or redirects to other [tn]roff source using the .so (source or
       inclusion)  macro,  you	should be in the parent directory of the page,
       since pages are written with this assumption. For example, if  you  are
       translating /usr/man/man1/ls.1, first cd into /usr/man.

       PolyglotMan   accepts  man  pages  from:	 SunOS,	 Sun Solaris, Hewlett-
       Packard HP-UX, AT&T System V, OSF/1 aka Digital UNIX, DEC  Ultrix,  SGI
       IRIX,  Linux,  FreeBSD,	SCO.  Source  processing works for: SunOS, Sun
       Solaris, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, AT&T System V, OSF/1 aka Digital	 UNIX,
       DEC  Ultrix.  It	 can  produce printable ASCII-only (control characters
       stripped), section headers-only, Tk, TkMan, [tn]roff  (traditional  man
       page source), SGML, HTML, MIME, LaTeX, LaTeX2e, RTF, Perl 5 POD. A mod‐
       ular architecture permits easy addition of additional output formats.

       The  latest  version  of	  PolyglotMan	is   always   available	  from
       ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/rman.tar.Z .

OPTIONS
       The following options should not be used with any others and exit Poly‐
       glotMan without processing any input.

       -h|--help      Show list of command line options and exit.

       -v|--version   Show version number and exit.

       You should specify the filter first, as this sets a number  of  parame‐
       ters, and then specify other options.

       -f|--filter				     <ASCII|roff|TkMan|Tk|Sec‐
       tions|HTML|SGML|MIME|LaTeX|LaTeX2e|RTF|POD>
		      Set the output filter. Defaults to ASCII.

       -S|--source    PolyglotMan tries to automatically determine whether its
		      input is source or formatted; use this option to declare
		      source input.

       -F|--format|--formatted
		      PolyglotMan tries to automatically determine whether its
		      input is source or formatted; use this option to declare
		      formatted input.

       -l|--title printf-string
		      In HTML mode this sets the <TITLE>  of  the  man	pages,
		      given the same parameters as -r .

       -r|--reference|--manref printf-string
		      In  HTML	and SGML modes this sets the URL form by which
		      to retrieve other man pages. The string can use two sup‐
		      plied  parameters:  the  man  page name and its section.
		      (See the Examples section.)  If the string is  null  (as
		      if  set from a shell by "-r ''"), `-' or `off', then man
		      page references will not be HREFs, just set in  italics.
		      If  your	printf supports XPG3 positions specifier, this
		      can be quite flexible.

       -V|--volumes <colon-separated list>
		      Set the list of valid  volumes  to  check	 against  when
		      looking	for   cross-references	to  other  man	pages.
		      Defaults to 1:2:3:4:5:6:7:8:9:o:l:n:p (volume names  can
		      be  multicharacter).  If an non-whitespace string in the
		      page is immediately followed by a left parenthesis, then
		      one  of  the valid volumes, and ends with optional other
		      characters  and  then  a	right  parenthesis--then  that
		      string  is  reported  as	a  reference to another manual
		      page. If this -V string starts with an equals sign, then
		      no  optional characters are allowed between the match to
		      the list of valids  and  the  right  parenthesis.	 (This
		      option is needed for SCO UNIX.)

       The  following  options	apply  only  when formatted pages are given as
       input. They do not apply or  are	 always	 handled  correctly  with  the
       source.

       -b|--subsections
		      Try  to  recognize subsection titles in addition to sec‐
		      tion titles.  This can cause problems on some UNIX  fla‐
		      vors.

       -K|--nobreak   Indicate	manual	pages don't have page breaks, so don't
		      look for footers and headers around them.	 (Older	 nroff
		      -man  macros  always put in page breaks, but lately some
		      vendors have realized that  printout  are	 made  through
		      troff,  whereas  nroff  -man is used to format pages for
		      reading on screen, and so have eliminated page  breaks.)
		      PolyglotMan   usually  gets this right even without this
		      flag.

       -k|--keep      Keep headers and footers, as a canonical report  at  the
		      end  of  the  page.  changeleft Move changebars, such as
		      those found in the Tcl/Tk manual pages, to the left. -->
		      notaggressive  Disable   aggressive  man	page  parsing.
		      Aggressive manual, which is on by default, page  parsing
		      elides  headers  and  footers,  identifies  sections and
		      more. -->

       -n|--name name Set name of man page (used in roff format). If the file‐
		      name  is	given in the form " name . section ", the name
		      and section are automatically determined. If the page is
		      being parsed from [tn]roff source and it has a .TH line,
		      this information is extracted from that line.

       -p|--paragraph paragraph mode toggle.  The  filter  determines  whether
		      lines  should  be	 linebroken  as they were by nroff, or
		      whether lines should be flowed together into paragraphs.
		      Mainly for internal use.

       -s|section #   Set  volume  (aka	 section)  number of man page (used in
		      roff format).  tables Turn on aggressive table  parsing.
		      -->

       -t|--tabstops #
		      For  those  macros sets that use tabs in place of spaces
		      where possible in order to reduce the number of  charac‐
		      ters used, set tabstops every #  columns. Defaults to 8.

NOTES ON FILTER TYPES
   ROFF
       Some  flavors  of  UNIX	ship  man page without [tn]roff source, making
       one's laser printer little more than a laser-powered daisy wheel.  This
       filer  tries to intuit the original [tn]roff directives, which can then
       be recompiled by [tn]roff.

   TkMan
       TkMan, a hypertext man page browser, uses PolyglotMan to show man pages
       without	the  (usually)	useless	 headers and footers on each pages. It
       also collects section and  (optionally)	subsection  heads  for	direct
       access  from  a	pulldown  menu. TkMan and Tcl/Tk, the toolkit in which
       it's    written,	   are	  available    via    anonymous	   ftp	  from
       ftp://ftp.smli.com/pub/tcl/

   Tk
       This  option  outputs  the  text in a series of Tcl lists consisting of
       text-tags pairs, where tag names roughly correspond to HTML.  This out‐
       put can be inserted into a Tk text widget by doing an eval <textwidget>
       insert end <text> . This format should be relatively easily parsible by
       other programs that want both the text and the tags. Also see ASCII.

   ASCII
       When  printed  on a line printer, man pages try to produce special text
       effects by overstriking characters with themselves  (to	produce	 bold)
       and  underscores (underlining). Other text processing software, such as
       text editors, searchers, and indexers, must counteract this. The	 ASCII
       filter  strips away this formatting. Piping nroff output through col -b
       also strips away this formatting, but it leaves behind  unsightly  page
       headers and footers. Also see Tk.

   Sections
       Dumps  section and (optionally) subsection titles. This might be useful
       for another program that processes man pages.

   HTML
       With a simple extention to an HTTP server for  Mosaic  or  other	 World
       Wide  Web  browser,  PolyglotMan	  can produce high quality HTML on the
       fly. Several  such  extensions  and  pointers  to  several  others  are
       included in PolyglotMan 's contrib  directory.

   SGML
       This  is	 appoaching  the Docbook DTD, but I'm hoping that someone that
       someone with a real interest in this will polish	 the  tags  generated.
       Try it to see how close the tags are now.

   MIME
       MIME  (Multipurpose  Internet  Mail Extensions) as defined by RFC 1563,
       good for consumption by MIME-aware  e-mailers  or  as  Emacs  (>=19.29)
       enriched documents.

   LaTeX and LaTeX2e
       Why not?

   RTF
       Use  output on Mac or NeXT or whatever. Maybe take random man pages and
       integrate with NeXT's documentation system better.  Maybe NeXT has  own
       man page macros that do this.

   PostScript and FrameMaker
       To  produce  PostScript,	 use  groff  or psroff . To produce FrameMaker
       MIF, use FrameMaker's builtin filter. In both cases you	need  [tn]roff
       source, so if you only have a formatted version of the manual page, use
       PolyglotMan 's roff filter first.

EXAMPLES
       To convert the formatted	 man  page  named  ls.1	  back	into  [tn]roff
       source form:

       rman -f roff /usr/local/man/cat1/ls.1 > /usr/local/man/man1/ls.1

       Long  man  pages are often compressed to conserve space (compression is
       especially effective on formatted man pages as many of  the  characters
       are  spaces).  As  it  is a long man page, it probably has subsections,
       which we try to separate out (some macro sets don't distinguish subsec‐
       tions  well  enough for PolyglotMan to detect them). Let's convert this
       to LaTeX format:

       pcat /usr/catman/a_man/cat1/automount.z | rman -b -n automount -s 1  -f
       latex > automount.man

       Alternatively,  man  1 automount | rman -b -n automount -s 1 -f latex >
       automount.man

       For HTML/Mosaic users, PolyglotMan  can, without	 modification  of  the
       source  code,  produce  HTML  links  that point to other HTML man pages
       either pregenerated or generated on the fly. First let's assume pregen‐
       erated  HTML  versions of man pages stored in /usr/man/html .  Generate
       these one-by-one with the following form:
       rman -f html -r	'http:/usr/man/html/%s.%s.html'	 /usr/man/cat1/ls.1  >
       /usr/man/html/ls.1.html

       If  you've  extended  your  HTML client to generate HTML on the fly you
       should use something like:
       rman -f html -r 'http:~/bin/man2html?%s:%s' /usr/man/cat1/ls.1
       when generating HTML.

BUGS/INCOMPATIBILITIES
       PolyglotMan  is not perfect in all cases, but it usually	 does  a  good
       job,  and  in  any  case reduces the problem of converting man pages to
       light editing.

       Tables in formatted pages, especially H-P's, aren't handled very	 well.
       Be sure to pass in source for the page to recognize tables.

       The  man pager woman  applies its own idea of formatting for man pages,
       which can confuse PolyglotMan . Bypass woman  by passing the  formatted
       manual page text directly into PolyglotMan .

       The  [tn]roff  output format uses fB to turn on boldface. If your macro
       set requires .B, you'll have to a postprocess the PolyglotMan output.

SEE ALSO
       tkman(1) , xman(1) , man(1) , man(7) or man(5)  depending on your  fla‐
       vor of UNIX

AUTHOR
       PolyglotMan
       by Thomas A. Phelps ( phelps@ACM.org )
       developed at the
       University of California, Berkeley
       Computer Science Division

       Manual page last updated on $Date: 1998/07/13 09:47:28 $

								PolyglotMan(1)
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