docbook-to-man1

Usage

Overview

The docbook-to-man tool is a batch converter that transforms UNIX-style manpages from the DocBook SGML DTD into nroff/troff -man macros.

docbook-to-man is the shell command that runs the low-level components to translate a single DocBook SGML document instance (whose document element is <RefEntry>) into pretty-much vanilla -man macros, with tables rendered in tbl.

This is not the original version by Fred Dalrymple, but one with the ANS Modifications by David Bolen ([email protected]).

This manual page and some small changes are by W. Borgert [email protected] for Debian GNU/Linux. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts.

White space and special characters

If you want to use tabs in your manpage you should use <programlisting>, <literal> or <screen> and invoke docbook-to-man with INSTANT_OPT set to a tab character. Be aware that multiple tabs will be collapsed into one.

When you want to collapse white space into one, you should invoke docbook-to-man with INSTANT_OPT set to a space character.

Special characters like \, ' or . will not be interpreted if you set INSTANT_OPT to a space or tab character.

Environment

If the variable INSTANT_OPT is not set, the instant(1) is called with the parameter -d by docbook-to-man. If you don't want this, e.g. if you want to use some special characters literally in your SGML file, you can set INSTANT_OPT to just a space character:

INSTANT_OPT=" " docbook-to-man src.sgml > dst.1

Note: The better way to use special characters like ^ or > is to write them in the SGML way, i.e. &caret; or &gt;.