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New online man pages for Debian

New online man pages for Debian

Posted Feb 3, 2017 7:37 UTC (Fri) by mstapelberg (subscriber, #66308)
In reply to: New online man pages for Debian by flussence
Parent article: New online man pages for Debian

> 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!


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