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From: nikos@cbl.leeds.ac.uk (N F Drakos)
Subject: Re: How about something more than Xman/regular manpages
Message-ID: <1993Aug5.164153.28503@gps.leeds.ac.uk>
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Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1993 16:41:53 GMT
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SG wrote:


: I am planning to build a system, which would be better than regular unix man
: pages and Xman by trying to make it hypertext and adding other features
: which would make it easier to browse through. It would be quicker in 
: searching for a particular piece of information a user is looking for 
: in a manual  page ( most of the times we are  looking for a specific 
: piece of information in a manpage e.g. a particular option to a command )


: I plan to implement it using one of the X Window toolkits..

Why don't you use already existing hypertext viewers such as the
publicly available NCSA MOSAIC which can display HTML 
(HyperText Markup Language). Filters for converting Unix man pages to
HTML already exist. 
One such filter is man2www v0.5 from Rik Harris
<rik@au.edu.monash.rdt.daneel>

Here is the announcement:
>
..
>OK, I finally did it.  Version 0.5 of my man2www package which I have
>told several people that I would make available "in a couple of weeks"
>many months ago, is now available.  This may not be entirely what you
>wanted, David, but I've been promising this for a while.  You can get
>it from:
>
>ftp.vifp.monash.edu.au:/pub/src/infosystems/www/man2www0.5.tar.gz
>
>It converts UNIX manual pages to nicely formatted html.  Headings are
>headings, italics are italics, formatting is not too bad, and
>references to other manuals are hypertexted.  And it still has some
>bugs.  I'll fix them if I ever get time.
>...
>rik
>

If you have acess to the WWW (World Wide Web) you can get a filter 
for bsdi man pages from
http://www.bsdi.com/server/bsdi-man.pl  (in perl)
and for sun man pages 
http://www.bsdi.com/server/sunman.pl  (also in perl)

Nikos Drakos,
Computer Based Learning Unit,
University of Leeds.