Subject: Re: First edition Unix manuals
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.3.95q.980508150740.5409B-100000@red.csi.cam.ac.uk> from Alan Bain at "May 8, 98 03:08:38 pm"
To: afrb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk (Alan Bain)
Date: Sat, 9 May 1998 10:14:19 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au
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Message-Id: <19980509151419.3780A0D9A@jacobs.Geeks.ORG>
From: merlyn@Geeks.ORG (Doug McIntyre)
Sender: owner-pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au
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> On Fri, 8 May 1998, Robert D. Keys wrote:
>>> On Thu,  7 May 1998 at  9:05:02 -0400, Robert D. Keys wrote:
>>>> I emailed him about the possibility of recreating the roff sources,
>>>> an I will probably wind up doing that.  Then we will have a working
>>>> set of sources for clean copy.
>>> 
>>> Great idea.  Keep us posted.
>>> 
>>> Greg
>> 
>> I have the intro and first few manpages of section 1 done so far.
>> Maybe a week or so and then if someone will proof them.  I will
>> port them in original roff source, and then make a troff set.
>> Dennis was wanting someone to tackle an html version.  Alas, my
>> html is not so good.
>> 
> It shouldn't be that hard to make HTML directly from the roff source (I
> could probably be persuaded to do something like this, given the roff
> source first of course!)

Or use programs written already to do that, like RosettaMan (at least
I still call it that, the author changed its name). Here's a blurb
from its announcement.

:: PolyglotMan (nee RosettaMan) is a filter for UNIX manual pages.  It
:: takes as input man pages for a variety of UNIX flavors and produces as
:: output a variety of file formats.  Currently PolyglotMan accepts man
:: pages from the following flavors of UNIX: Hewlett-Packard HP-UX, AT&T
:: System V, SunOS, Sun Solaris, OSF/1, DEC Ultrix, SGI IRIX, Linux, SCO,
:: FreeBSD; and produces output for the following formats: printable
:: ASCII only (stripping page headers and footers), section and
:: subsection headers only, TkMan, [tn]roff, RTF, SGML (soon--I finally
:: found a DTD), HTML, MIME, LaTeX, LaTeX 2e, Perl 5's pod.  Previously
:: <I>PolyglotMan</I> required pages to be formatted by nroff prior to
:: its processing; with version 3.0, it prefers [tn]roff source and
:: usually can produce results that are better yet.
:: 
:: PolyglotMan improves upon other man page filters in several ways: (1) its
:: analysis recognizes the structural pieces of man pages, enabling high
:: quality output, (2) its modular structure permits easy augmentation of
:: output formats, (3) it accepts man pages formatted with the variant
:: macros of many different flavors of UNIX, and (4) it doesn't require
:: modification of or cooperation with any other program.

:: The home location for PolyglotMan is ftp.cs.berkeley.edu:
:: /ucb/people/phelps/tcltk/rman.tar.Z (this is a softlink to the latest,
:: numbered version).  If you discover a bug and you obtained PolyglotMan
:: at some other site, first grab it from this one to see if the problem
:: has been fixed.

This is only for man pages, but probably could take the papers in ms
format and give a rough translation, or hack up polyglotman some to do
ms as well..