Lo, on Saturday, September 22, Michael P. Soulier did write:
> Hey people.
>
> Is there a decent way to translate from info to man? I personally hate
> info pages, and I'd like to convert and contribute some converted info
> documentation. I greatly prefer man.
>
> I know there are tools to convert info and man to html, and that's a
> decent format when read with lynx. Maybe the answer would be to convert
> all to html, and then write a front-end for lynx so I could type (help
> <page>) and it would invoke lynx on the appropriate page.
>
> Any information on the above?
>From the texinfo info page, `Using Texinfo' node:
From time to time, proposals are made to generate traditional Unix man
pages from Texinfo source. This is not likely to ever be supported,
because man pages have a very strict conventional format. Merely
enhancing `makeinfo' to output troff format would be insufficient.
Generating a good man page therefore requires a completely different
source than the typical Texinfo applications of generating a good user
manual or a good reference manual. This makes generating man pages
incompatible with the Texinfo design goal of not having to document the
same information in different ways for different output formats. You
might as well just write the man page directly.
There's certainly no `official' way of doing this kind of conversion, no.
There is a texi2man script included, oddly enough, in the source for the
`units' package. It works reasonably well for the units info page, but not
general case. For that matter, the resulting units manpage doesn't look
like a traditional manpage; the sections are different, and they're in a
different order. Plus, if you look at the units.texi source, there are a
bunch of nonstandard extensions which presumably help texi2man do its job
better.
Richard
