Message 1/37  From Richard Verhoeven                Mar 17, 99 10:13:49 am
+0100

Return-Path: <rcb5@win.tue.nl>
Subject: Re: man2html and my very non-standard distro
To: humbubba@smarty.smart.net (Rick Hohensee)
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 1999 10:13:49 +0100 (MET)

Hi,

> man2html is a godsend. I am assembling a GNU/Linux with html manpages
> ONLY. I had done many of the manpages without man2html until recently.
Now
> I get to re-do them. But they are much nicer. My distro is called
cLIeNUX
> and is at http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/distributions/cLIeNUX
> and the 2.2 one is at ftp://ftp.blueznet.com/pub/colorg . colorg is my
IRC
> nick.
>
Nice to now that there is a Linux distro that fits in 25Mb.  I guess
is doesn't include XFree86 and Netscape :-).

> As you probably noticed, this means all my manpages are in /help/man
> itself, with no man1 man2 man3 etc.  Some typical full manpage pathnames
> are
>       /help/man/cat.1.html
>       /help/man/cat.L.html
>       /help/man/bind.2.html
>       /help/man/ed.1.man
> i.e. the sections are differentiated by the filename middle, usually a
> number. .L. BTW, is for "legacy", a few of the 1971 UNIX Programmer's
> Manual pages. dmr himself OK'ed me using "a few".
>
>
> Pardon the odd non-standard arrangement. I'm sticking with it. My
question
> is, what is the SIMPLEST way to support correct hyperlinks for it with
> man2html being used at page format time? i.e. only running man2html for
a
line 1

The simplest way is probably adjusting the source code that adds the links
or to run a sed/awk/perl script on each page.  Note that my version of
man2html does not handle all pages correctly, especially some BSD and
Solaris pages.  Michael Hamilton added BSD support and someone from the
Debian distro further modified and extended it.  So, you might want to
use one of the extended versions.  The URLs:

http://home.clear.net.nz/pages/michael.hamilton/gifts.html
http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/doc/man2html.html


If you plan to adjust the source code, which shouldn't be too difficult,
you can probable make some other changes, such as removing links to
include files or e-mail addresses.  The function "add_links" creates the
links while the file is converted and it contains some explanation of what
happens.  When a link is added, the source code contains a printf
statement
that adds <A HREF=...>..</A> to the document.  It is very easy to either
remove or change these statements.  In your case, you could
change it to
   printf("<A HREF=\"file:/help/man/%s.%c.html\">%s</A>", h, sec, h);
to get the correct links.

> I'd also suggest a switch to man2html to disable the internal page
index,
> but that I can fake easily.

It is not too difficult to change that either.  At the start and the end
of the page, a link to the index and the index itself is added. You can
easily remove the statements that produce it.  Search for #index and
<H2>Index  to find the interesting locations.

> Thanks for man2html.

I have to adjust man2html myself, due to differences between Solaris

