Man pages server code, anyone?
Steve Romig <romig@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 92 00:17:53 -0400
From: Steve Romig <romig@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Message-id: <9209290417.AA01784@brachiosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu>
To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch, ruth@fnal.fnal.gov
In-reply-to: Tim Berners-Lee's message of Mon, 28 Sep 92 13:40:33 MET <9209281240.AA04048@ nxoc01.cern.ch >
Subject: Man pages server code, anyone?
I wrote a simple set of scripts that ran the unformatted man sources
through nroff with a special set of man macros that did away with the
page headings/footings, and converted the formatted ascii output into
html. I wanted to convert any references to things that look like man
pages (as in "man(1)") to links. What I really wanted was to put the
man page in a <listing> environment to preserve the formatting, but
you can't embed anchors there. </LISTING><A ...>...</A><LISTING>
seems to cause paragraph breaks, not quite what I had in mind.
I finally settled on making a list of the man page references and
turned them into an extra See Also section at the end of the document.
Its ugly, but functional. I'll clean up the code and make it
available if anyone is interested.
It would be nice if there were a thing like LISTING that allowed
anchors. Are there any plans for such a thing (or maybe there's a way
to do it now that I don't know about)? It would make the task of
converting misc text files into HTML much easier.
--- Steve