This is a trivial script to generate an epub from a list of man pages. I wrote this as none of the alternatives did what I wanted, and I find reading man pages on my ebook reader on the go very practical.
You need man2html and calibre installed, and of course the list of
man pages you want to read, installed such that man can find them.
Note that on Debian/Ubuntu, the man2html-base package is enough, the
man2html package brings in Apache as well for a CGI interface, which
is not useful.
Simply run the generate script, passing the list of desired man pages,
ideally in the form of name.section:
./generate.sh namespaces.7 credentials.7
The section is required when the name resolves to multiple sections.
The output will be left as index.epub. You can customise the
metadata as needed, of course.
The current backend is man2html, more specifically the version as
distributed in Debian—and this has lots of patches. I've tried to use
mandoc as well, but it has worse quirks than man2html.
The advantage of man2html is that it can generate a tree of
documents for which internal links (references) work correctly, which
almost makes the result feel like a coherent document.
There are a couple of repositories that seem to do the same, but not quite:
- https://github.com/younix/man2epub: doesn't seem to generate cross-links, only standalone pages in the document; also very specific to openbsd/its man syntax, I think;
- https://github.com/nerab/manbook: while promising, it's untouched (except bumping of dependencies) in a long while, and actually misses the main functionality, of combining pages into a book;
On the "generate HTML from man pages" there are other tools, but even investigating them seemed more complex than just writing a simple shell script. So, that's the story.
Iustin Pop, iustin@k1024.org.