On 06/03/14 16:35, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > No, what I want is for all Unix documentation to be properly wenbbed and > crosslinked.
I find it difficult to understand why groff needs a .hygiene, maybe it's because I'm a dirty rascal! It seems to be a switch which is designed to stop naughty man pages from working, in the hope this will prompt the man page authors into changing them. But these are only "naughty" because they don't play nicely with Eric's tool set, not that there is anything wrong with them from the groff typesetting perspective. So we are pondering whether to create this work for an unknown number of man page authors. The reason for doing this should be defensible, but I wonder whether it is? The stated reason for this is the desire to make the man pages browseable, which requires semantic markup of the document in order to produce decent html. However, there are other routes to this goal, which do not require the participation of recalcitrant man page authors, nor patches to documents. All browsers will happily display pdf documents, and since groff can easily produce pdf documents which include embedded URLs, is there any reason why they should not be the medium for having browseable man pages. A little bit of work today has got me to a working solution. First you need a protocol for man pages. My linux already has the protocol "man:/" (which is tied into use some form of "man2html" which produces less than beatiful results), so I hijacked that protocol by changing it to call a program (pdfmansec) which takes the URL "man:/section/name" and calls "man -t -S section name". Meanwhile, the man config file is changed to use the pipeline "pdfman | groff -T pdf -mandoc | okular -". The program pdfman simply adds the required calls to pdfhref etc. The results of this are in can be seen here:- <http://chuzzlewit.co.uk/pdfman-examples.tgz> It contains a few random pdf man pages, as examples, the two programs I added to my system, and the kde protocol file. The links to other man pages in the pdf examples will not work unless you have configured the "man:/" protocol for your system, but any links to the web will work. It even worked in the url bar for firefox, when it asks for what to use for this protocol enter 'pdfmansec'. Or you can still use 'man -t cmd' from the console to get the clickable pdf. It is still in need of some work and if you explore your man pages using the clickable links, I'm absolutely sure you will find some which break the pdf, but I've only spent a day and a half so far. Any comments or suggestions gratefully received. When my wife enquired "What have you been up to in the office?" and my reply was "Playing with my man pages.", I don't think she quite understood what I meant. Deri
