makeman.pl 1 August 27th, 2001 MakeMan Writing Man Pages makeman.pl parse an SGML man page into valid roff source makeman.pl -h -i FILE -o FILE -v makeman.pl is part of MakeMan, a project to provide several frontends, GUI and non-GUI, to an SGML interface to write man pages. makeman.pl, written in Perl, parses an SGML input file and generates valid roff source that can be read by man. Per default, makeman.pl reads the output of nsgmls from stdin and write roff sources to stdout. Alternatively, the input- and output-files can be specified as command-line options, in which case the input file may be the SGML source. The following is a list of the tags supported by makeman.pl: <refentry> Encloses the entire document. <refmeta> Encloses the meta information. Together with <refentryterm>, <manvolnum> and <refmiscinfo> this section forms the Header of the man page. <refnamediv> Together with <refname> and <refpurpose> this forms the NAME section of the man page, which is used by apropos(1) and whatis(1). <refsynopsisdiv> Encloses the SYNOPSIS section of the man page. In it, <cmdsynopsis> wraps the <command> and the optional <arg> tags. <refsect1> Encloses a main SECTION (".SH") in the man page. <refsect2> Encloses a SUBSECTION (".SS") in the man page. <title> Currently supported within the <refsect1> and <refsect2>. Simiarly, <term> is used for lists (".TH"). <para> Encloses a PARAGRAPH (".PP"). <variablelist> Together with one or more <varlistentry> tags lists such as this can be created (".TP"). <simplelist> A simple list. Can have an attribute type: inline - comma separated vert -- like this <itemizedlist> An itemized list. Can have an attribute spacing (if "compact" use as little whitespace as possible) and mark Within this list, the <listitem> tag can have an attribute override, which can have the same values as the mark attribute, causing the following items to be itemized by the according character. Values for mark and override are: bullet - use \(bu to itemize emdash - use \(em to itemize <orderedlist> An ordered list. Can have an attribute spacing (if "compact" use as little whitespace as possible), numeration and continuation. numeration can be one of "arabic" (default; enumerate by incrementing arabic number), "loweralpha" (enumerate by incrementing the lowercase letters of the alphabet) or "upperalpha" (enumerate by incrementing the uppercase letters of the alphabet). continuation can be one of "restarts" (default; each ordered list has it's own counting and starts from 0/a/A) or "continues" (each ordered list continues to increment the item numbers from where the last list stopped) <replaceable> Commonly used when listing the comand-line options, signifying that this parameter can be replaced. It will be diplayed in italics ("\fI \fR"). <filename> Encosing a fileame, which will be diplayed in italics ("\fI \fR"). <optinal> Contents will be placed in square brackets ("[" and "]"). <ulink> Similar to an HTML <a href> tag. Signifies that the contents are linked to a URL. Will be displayed as "Contents (Link to \fIURL\fR)" A summary of the options supported by makeman.pl is included below. -h Show summary of options and exit. -i FILE Read SGML from FILE. -o FILE Write output to FILE. -v Show version information and exit. In a pipe: nsgmls infile.sgml | makeman.pl Alone: makeman.pl -i infile.sgml Perl, SGMLSp, expat, nsgmls (part of SP) 0.2 Different indention levels within variable lists within subsections are not displayed correctly. Please report all bugs to the author. man(7) http://mama.sourceforge.net Jan Schaumann jschauma@netmeister.org