Hi Eric, Eric Oyen wrote on Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 10:54:25AM -0700:
> well, I am wondering what packages I can use to edit man pages. > also, I may have to change how a man page would be laid out because > my screen reader (both in linux and OS X) seem to have trouble handling > the change in content when I navigate through a man page in a terminal > session. I don't think i understand what exactly the problem is, but if the problem exists with OpenBSD as well (not just Linux and OS X), i'd be interested in understanding the problem and considering whether anything can be done about it. Are you running your screen reader with terminal output or with an X session, i.e. man(1) in getty(8) or man(1) in an xterm(1)? Is the problem mitigated (or aggravated) when you change the line _build .[1-9n] /usr/bin/mandoc %s in the file /etc/man.conf to read: _build .[1-9n] /usr/bin/mandoc %s | col -b I'm not suggesting that for production, just to better understand your issue. Can you, in any way, give more details about what exactly is inconvenient about the way manuals get presented to you? > There was a web page converter that would take man pages and convert > them to web content. it required installing a specific package, > starting a local web server and then typing in a URL bar in a web > client the command: "man: <man> page here>". I was never entirely > able to get that to work on either OS X or linux. Wow, that sounds terribly contorted, i'd recomment against all the elements in that approach. Almost certainly, there is no need for packages(7) any longer. Does output from the following command please you: mandoc -Thtml /usr/share/man/man1/cat.1 | lynx -stdin If it does, you could try to play around with man.conf(5), for example like this: _build .[1-9n] /usr/bin/mandoc -Thtml %s And then set the following variable, maybe even in .profile: export MANPAGER="lynx -force_html" Again, i'm not saying this is the way to go, just trying to fan out some weird ideas, that might or might not help you... Not sure HTML is the way to go at all, it seems more likely that you can somehow get -Tascii to work well for you, but *if* you have to go for HTML for whatever reason, there are lots of ways to do it without requiring packages, web servers, or typing into URL bars... > anyway, there are those of us out here willing to do the work, but would > appreciate some preliminary documentation from DEVS as to what goes where. Hum, i understand you want to help improving manuals - which is clearly welcome. If you need to know anything specific to become able to send patches, and fail to find it yourself, just ask, and try to ask as precisely to the point as you can! Yours, Ingo
