Re: alternative man page reader?
On Sat, 15 May 1999, Lars Wirzenius wrote: Othmar Pasteka [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Actually you can make some text output with groff, for instance: groff -man -Tascii pon.1 pon.txt Yes, of course. The point raised earlier by this thread is that groff takes lots of space. The programs I pointed at of pretty much minimal size. Could the minimum files neccessary to execute the above functionality be split out from groff? We don't need all those fonts and tmac's and those utility programs, and who knows what else, just to read man pages. And the man command could be implemented with just a shell script, no caching or anything like that. Here, for example, is a teeny tiny little nroff that does a good job reading most, but not all man pages: ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/text/nroffsrc.tar.Z -Brad
Re: alternative man page reader?
Bradley Bell wrote:
Here, for example, is a teeny tiny little nroff that does a good job
reading most, but not all man pages:
ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/utils/text/nroffsrc.tar.Z
I'll have to check this out. If anyone is thinking about implementing
a short 'man' shell script to go with it, here's what i'm using. Maybe
you can hack around with it.
#!/bin/sh
MANPATHS=/usr/man/ /usr/X11R6/man/
SECTIONS=[1-8] # change this to 1 for standard 'man' behavior
if test $# == 2; then SECTIONS=$1; shift; fi
find $MANPATHS -name $1.${SECTIONS}*.gz -exec zcat -q '{}' ';' | \
groff -t -mandoc -Tascii - 2/dev/null | ${PAGER:-more}
It works pretty well, and I haven't noticed much of a speed
difference. Consequently, I've been able to get rid of man-db, libdb2,
and the whole /var/catman hierarchy. If anyone can suggest
improvements or point out something problematic it'd be very welcome.
--
Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law: if you wrap the
Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet,
software flows in the network.
RE: alternative man page reader?
Hi, I just joined the list and missed the beginning of the thread, but I generally use man2html in a cron job and have a shell cgi do a find in the htdocs area from my apache site when I get a little confused... Most of my stuff is perl anyway, being C illiterate, so I also do a lot of pod2html. HOW-TO's also belong in their as well. A cgi search would find ~htdocs/man_as_html/* -name *.html | xargs grep -l $subj_string | manpage_and_href_printer back to the browser... I am now supporting some numerical analysis scientists who like to think of themselves as novice admins :) === John van Vlaanderen # #CXN, Inc. Contact: # #[EMAIL PROTECTED] # #1 917 309 7379 (cell, voice mail) # # _ Do You Yahoo!? Free instant messaging and more at http://messenger.yahoo.com
Re: alternative man page reader?
Hi, Actually you can make some text output with groff, for instance: groff -man -Tascii pon.1 pon.txt works for me :). Let's say for the manuals, but works. so long Othmar
Re: alternative man page reader?
Lars Wirzenius wrote: Manual pages are actually written in a new language, defined using the troff macro language. It is much simpler than the real troff language. This may no longer be true. I see quite a few codes in manpages that aren't defined by man(7). For example, the manpage for [ contains sequences like .B \-b \fIfile\fP The \fI and \fP don't look like man macros to me. Richard Braakman
RE: alternative man page reader?
On 13-May-99 Bradley Bell wrote: has anybody thought about packaging an alternative to the man-db/groff combination for reading man pages? 4mb is a lot for small systems, and reading man pages is pretty much a neccessity. Maybe I am wrong here but, how else are you gonna do it? man pages are written in roff format (think of it as old html). Any other man reader would have to speak roff as well.
Re: alternative man page reader?
On Thu, May 13, 1999 at 11:17:57PM -0400, Shaleh wrote: : : On 13-May-99 Bradley Bell wrote: : has anybody thought about packaging an alternative to the man-db/groff : combination for reading man pages? 4mb is a lot for small systems, and : reading man pages is pretty much a neccessity. : : Maybe I am wrong here but, how else are you gonna do it? man pages are written : in roff format (think of it as old html). Any other man reader would have to : speak roff as well. groff is only needed for `formatting' the man pages. If you preformat all the pages you can fire groff and have you man pages anyway. But I don't know about disk usage of the preformatted pages and if it's easy to . format all pages . delete all unformatted pages . remove groff . use the formatted pages from /var/catman/ only w/o braking something. Best Regards from Dresden/Germany Viele Gruesse aus Dresden Heiko Schlittermann -- [internet unix support - Heiko Schlittermann] [a href=http://debian.schlittermann.de/; Debian 2.1 CD /a] [Heiko Schlittermann HS12-RIPE finger:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -] [pgp: A1 7D F6 7B 69 73 48 35 E1 DE 21 A7 A8 9A 77 92 ---]
alternative man page reader?
has anybody thought about packaging an alternative to the man-db/groff combination for reading man pages? 4mb is a lot for small systems, and reading man pages is pretty much a neccessity. -Brad -Brad
