is there any way to convert man pages into HTML or any other better readable format for example the text output i get with man fseek i want to re-format the text into html or something else there seems to be a tool called man2html.. i just cant get it to work... could anyone plz show with example

It's not exactly an answer to your question but you can try 'xman' to display manual pages. It provides scrollbars, section browsing etc... Maybe it looks ugly, but it provides information.
[edit1]: I looked up the man2html manpage (read it!). Suppose you have the manpage that you want to convert to html, for example the manpage of 'cp'. You'll have to know the exact location of it. Most probably it sits somewhere in /usr/man/, for me (Slackware 10) it's /usr/man/man1/cp.1.gz. (Note that the file is gzipped)
You'll have to uncompress it, pass it to man2html and redirect the output of man2html to a file because man2html outputs to stdout by default.
$ gunzip -c /usr/man/man1/cp.1.gz | man2html > cp-manpage.html
should do all this. The -c option decompresses the manpage to stdout.
If someone has a simpler way, let me know. I don't have much time right now to search for better alternatives.
[edit2]: You can get the exact filename with the -w option:
$ man -w cp
/usr/man/man1/cp.1.gz
$ man -w xterm
/usr/X11R6/man/man1/xterm.1x.gz

[Edited by - SwSh on August 23, 2004 7:47:55 AM]

http://linux.ctyme.com/cgi-swish/linuxdoc.cgi

Hello browny,

If you have Vim you can do a use its Man command.
It does a good job of formating the man page.

Didn't know about man2html, I have to try to find it.

Lord Bart

Thanx to SwSh.. Taking ur suggestions i have made a small shell script .. and WOW
reading man has never been so NICER for me...
thanx again. Here's the code of my shell-script. By the way, in my system all man pages are bzip2-ed that's why i used "bunzip2" below

You're welcome ;-)

Quote: Original post by browny
is there any way to convert man pages into HTML or any other better readable format

for example the text output i get with

man fseek

i want to re-format the text into html or something else

there seems to be a tool called man2html.. i just cant get it to work... could anyone plz show with example

Konquerer can also display man pages, for fseek, just type

man:fseek

in the address bar.

Here's some fun trivia about man:

the PAGER environment variable defines a command to pipe the (nroffed) man page into. On most (all?) linux distributions it's set to less, but you could do arbitrarily obnoxious things with it -- like :

will give you a rot13 "encoded" view of the man manpage,

will make your machine read you the page... and so on, ad nauseum.

Have fun!

KB