[Offtopic] man to hlp

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, Tobias Burnus wrote:

> Hallo Rolf, hi all,
> 
> > does anyone know a tools for converting unix man pages to windows help
> > files?
> 
> What's about rman (RosettaMan) which is available for Unix systems. rman can
> convert man pages in a number of formats (from rman -h):

Actually, it says it converts pre-formatted man pages (/usr/man/cat?), not
the same thing at all, and you need a way to make those if you only have
Win32 (groff can do it). And they are already hyphenated, etc, so
information has been lost.

> ASCII|roff|TkMan|Tk|Sections|HTML|SGML|MIME|LaTeX|LaTeX2e|RTF|pod
> 
> There are two possibilities:
> a) Since Microsoft moves to a HTML based help system, simply use rman -f HTML

`HTML based', not HTML....

> b) For workaholics: Convert to RTF and add some hidden text/keywords. Then run
> the RTF file through a help file compiler to obtain the .hlp file.

The most elegant way would be a Perl script from man to rtf. I have written
such a converter for another nroff-based help system from Bell Labs, but
not for man.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595