New online man pages for Debian

The varying font size in the HTML output for gcc(1) looks interesting.

For nice-looking man pages I prefer the Postscript (or PDF) version combined with an unobtrusive viewer program.

> Unfortunately, it looks like nobody who wrote that feature ever used it to see if it works

There’s actually a paper about the grohtml backend which man(1) uses: https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/grohtml.pdf

I can assure you that the authors have actually taken great care to ensure it looks good on the manpages they checked at the time — more than 10 years ago! What you’re seeing likely is the usual bitrot.

> I wouldn't mind installing something like debiman if it could be used offline similarly. I've missed having something like Konqueror back in the day (which had really nice native man/info page rendering).

debiman can easily be used offline, provided you don’t mind the bandwidth, disk space (3GB for Debian unstable, about 10GB for all suites) and CPU hours to generate/update the corpus (see https://github.com/Debian/debiman/blob/master/PERFORMANCE.md for details).

See https://github.com/Debian/debiman/#development-quick-start for instructions on how to install, run and browse the output. If you run into any issues or have any questions, a GitHub issue is the best way to get them resolved :).

If all you’re interested in is browsing locally available manpages in HTML, you can use the same renderer which manpages.debian.org uses: install the “mandoc” Debian package and use mandoc -Thtml <file>, possibly in a little script to directly open the result in your browser.

Hope that helps!

I used to use konqeror a lot for the info: browsing. The only usable 'info' browser I have ever encountered. I haven't used it recently though, and I've switched distros in the meantime. Unfortunately it doesn't work on kubuntu 16.10 :-( Pretty hard to google for 'info', so not obvious how to get it working again. Sooner or later I'll miss it a lot.