Little attempt is made to prettyprint the output HTML; that job is better left to a separate program, html-pretty(1).
Although some vendors, such as Sun Microsystems, provide clear documentation of how manual pages should be written, many manual page authors ignore those recommendations, and use arbitrary [nt]roff markup to achieve the traditional appearance of UNIX manual pages, without actually using the standard -man format commands.
man2html works quite well on Sun manual pages, but may be less successful on manual pages from other sources. In such a case, an alternative may be to use T. A. Phelp's RosettaMan(1), commonly installed as rman(1). That program works on the output of nroff(1), and attempts to guess manual page structure from the horizontal and vertical spacing in order to add HTML markup. When vendor-provided manual pages are available only in preformatted form, as on IBM AIX and SGI IRIX systems, rman(1) may be your only choice. However, when man2html can be used successfully, it can often do a better job than rman(1) because it has a better understanding of the document structure implied [nt]roff manual-page markup.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC ``...\''>declaration. The default, if this option is omitted, is -v HTML=3, to select grammar level 2, which is reasonably-well supported by all current browsers. The level 3 grammar has expired; some of its features, particularly the support for markup of mathematics, will appear in a future HTML grammar level. The version 3.2 grammar is a stopgap, which, despite its number, lies approximately between 2 and 3 in features. It was released on 5-Nov-1996 at
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/to provide a stable grammar toward which WWW browser developers could work.
- The output <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC ``...\''> declaration depends on the grammar level.
- At version 3 and above, the SGML entity can be used for non-breakable space instead of the less obvious numeric entity   which is required by the level 2 grammar.
- At version 3.2 and above, the output HTML will use <CENTER> ... </CENTER> directives to support centered text. At earlier grammar levels, centering requests are ignored, but lines are still broken as they would be when centered.
Centering is exceedingly rare (it is completely absent from all of Sun's standard manual pages), so the default level 2 grammar should almost always be sufficient.
Nelson H. F. Beebe Center for Scientific Computing University of Utah Department of Mathematics, 105 JWB 155 S 1400 E RM 233 Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090 USA Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] (Internet) WWW URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 FAX: +1 801 581 4148