Manual pages: not just for the console anymore
Posted by JoshTriplett on Thu 26 Oct 2006 at 14:21
You probably know about man, and how to read manual pages in the console. But did you know that man can display manual pages many other ways, such as in a browser, or in a printer-friendly form?
Manual pages use a typesetting format called roff (specifically, the man macros) to include some semantic structure to a document. This structure defines paragraphs, lists, headings, and manual page metadata. For more information on this format, read man 7 man.
Debian uses a Free Software implementation of roff from the GNU project, called groff. The Debian base system includes the package man-db, which contains (among other things) the man binary. This package Depends on the groff-base package, which includes some minimal functionality for rendering manual pages in a terminal, as formatted text. However, if you install the groff package (suggested by man-db), you get many additional output formats from man.
You can format a manual page as HTML by using the -Thtml option to man. By default, this will output the HTML-formatted manual page on standard output. As a shortcut, you can use man -H to format the manual page as HTML and open it in a web browser.
For easy printing, you can output a manual page as PostScript with -Tps. Again, this will output the PostScript-formatted manual page on standard output. You can capture it in a file, use a PostScript viewer which can view standard input, or pipe it straight to lpr to print it.
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For exemple you can see the man page for 'ls' by entering "#ls" in Konqueror's address bar or to use "##ls" for the info page.
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You can also type "man:whatever" or "info:whatever" after pressing F2. Lastly, if you install http://eduffy.net/deskbar-plugins/index.html#man you can open man pages from the deskbar (opens in yelp). This last one is the one I use all the time... really slick.
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##foo fails my usability test.
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the ## is just a shortcut, I guess.
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apt-get install man2html , reading manpages was never better ;)
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