Re: [Nmh-workers] Starting the final call for features for 1.7

[Anthony J. Bentley]

Ken Hornstein writes:
> >I think times when it would be useful to have the man pages rendered on
> >the web include
> 
> I think making this available on the web, in addition to the normal
> man pages included with the distribution, would be great.  I'm just not
> sure of the rendering method, and where to put it (I guess we could put
> it in the nmh web pages that are stored on Savannah).

There are a number of troff-to-html converters. In my experience the best
one is mandoc:

http://mdocml.bsd.lv/

Mandoc is excellent for -mdoc manuals, generating clean, semantic markup
from it. Results are more variable with -man manuals like nmh's, because
-man is not semantic and so mandoc has to do a lot more guesswork to
generate the HTML (as must every man-to-html converter). It still does
quite a good job; see the X manual for example:
http://man.openbsd.org/X.7

Side note: I've thought about converting the nmh documentation to -mdoc
(which is really a very good format with a nice long Unix heritage, and
these days is probably the second most used troff macro set after
-man)... but it would be quite a lot of work.

-- 
Anthony J. Bentley