Name

Synopsis

Description

PolyglotMan takes man pages from most of the popular flavors of UNIX and transforms them into any of a number of text source formats. PolyglotMan was formerly known as RosettaMan. The name of the binary is still called rman, for scripts that depend on that name; mnemonically, just think "reverse man". Previously PolyglotMan required pages to be formatted by nroff prior to its processing. With version 3.0, it prefers [tn]roff source and usually produces results that are better yet. And source processing is the only way to translate tables. Source format translation is not as mature as formatted, however, so try formatted translation as a backup.

In parsing [tn]roff source, one could implement an arbitrarily large subset of [tn]roff, which I did not and will not do, so the results can be off. I did implement a significant subset of those use in man pages, however, including tbl (but not eqn), if tests, and general macro definitions, so usually the results look great. If they don't, format the page with nroff before sending it to PolyglotMan. If PolyglotMan doesn't recognize a key macro used by a large class of pages, however, e-mail me the source and a uuencoded nroff-formatted page and I'll see what I can do. When running PolyglotMan with man page source that includes or redirects to other [tn]roff source using the .so (source or inclusion) macro, you should be in the parent directory of the page, since pages are written with this assumption. For example, if you are translating /usr/man/man1/ls.1, first cd into /usr/man.

PolyglotMan accepts man pages from: SunOS, Sun Solaris, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, AT&T System V, OSF/1 aka Digital UNIX, DEC Ultrix, SGI IRIX, Linux, FreeBSD, SCO. Source processing works for: SunOS, Sun Solaris, Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, AT&T System V, OSF/1 aka Digital UNIX, DEC Ultrix. It can produce printable ASCII-only (control characters stripped), section headers-only, Tk, TkMan, [tn]roff (traditional man page source), SGML, HTML, MIME, LaTeX, LaTeX2e, RTF, Perl 5 POD. A modular architecture permits easy addition of additional output formats.

The latest version of PolyglotMan is always available from ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/rman.tar.Z.

Options

The following options should not be used with any others and exit PolyglotMan without processing any input.

-h|--help

Show list of command line options and exit.

-v|--version

Show version number and exit.

You should specify the filter first, as this sets a number of parameters, and then specify other options.

-f|--filter <ASCII|roff|TkMan|Tk|Sections|HTML|SGML|MIME|LaTeX|LaTeX2e|RTF|POD>

Set the output filter. Defaults to ASCII.

-S|--source

PolyglotMan tries to automatically determine whether its input is source or formatted; use this option to declare source input.

-F|--format|--formatted

PolyglotMan tries to automatically determine whether its input is source or formatted; use this option to declare formatted input.

-l|--title printf-string

In HTML mode this sets the <TITLE> of the man pages, given the same parameters as -r.

-r|--reference|--manref printf-string

In HTML and SGML modes this sets the URL form by which to retrieve other man pages. The string can use two supplied parameters: the man page nam