cat2html

Translate output of (g)nroff to HTML

In other words, make a nice HTML document from a UNIX man page.

This is a modified version of cat2html originally written by Harald Schlangmann for NeXTSTEP in 1993 and later extended by Carl Lindberg for the ManOpen Mac app.

Minor modifications were made to make the code compile on modern macOS systems for both x86_64 and arm64 architectures, but it should also build and function just fine on other Unix-like systems that have lex or flex installed.

Building

macOS universal binary (arm64 and x86_64)

./build_macos.sh

The resulting binary will be created in the macos_bin folder.

Other Unix-like systems (Linux, BSD, etc.)

./build.sh

The resulting binary will be created in the bin folder.

Pre-built binaries

A pre-built universal binary for macOS is available in the dist folder.

Usage

Usage: cat2html [-il] [<filename>]
    Translate output of (g)nroff to HTML. If no
    <filename> is given, cat2html reads stdin.
    option -i uses italic characters for underlining.
    option -l adds 'manpage:' HREF links to other man pages.
    HTML output is sent to stdout.

How to convert a man page to HTML

/usr/bin/man -mandoc path/to/man_page.1 | ./cat2html > man_page.1.html

Projects using cat2html

• ManOpen - A macOS GUI application for viewing man pages
• ManDrake - A macOS GUI man page editor

... and many more command line tools that provide man pages viewable on the web.

License

(c) 1993 by Harald Schlangmann. Permission is granted to use this code.