Reading Linux man pages on the nook

[Quantalume]

It was thinking that the nook would be a good device to have around to view man pages, seeing as how there never seems to be enough real estate on the PC's screen. I had to find a web page that reflowed the man pages, since they are usually formatted for 80 columns, then use Google's mobilizer to remove frames and otherwise make it more nook friendly. Here's what I came up with as a good link: http://google.com/gwt/x?u=http://linux.die.net/man/. This displays pretty nicely in the nook's browser.

It would be nice to have offline man pages, too. Does anyone know of an effort to put man pages in epub format?

[luqmaninbmore]

You could always try web2fb2. That also creates an epub file in addition to the fb2.

[Quantalume]

Thanks for the link. I've now educated myself on the fb2 format in addition to trying out the converter. It only converts one page at a time, rather than traversing the html links and putting everything into one file. I guess I'll start with the most-needed commands, particularly any associated with troubleshooting network connectivity issues.

[cypresstwist]

man elinks > elinksmanual.txt && ebook-convert elinksmanual.txt elinksmanual.epub --no-default-epub-cover

For this you have to have Calibre installed (for ebook-convert). But Ițm sure you will find a way to automatize this so that you can extract all man pages and convert them to epub format.

/Later edit: since the TXT file loses the embedded man links and formatting, you might want to use this instead, to create a PDF file:

man -t groff | ps2pdf - > groff.pdf && ebook-convert groff.pdf groff.epub --no-default-epub-cover

Tested it and the epub file is successfully created with better formatting.

[lambdax]

Just found this thread through google. There's another way that works really well: use man to format the page as html and send it to Calibre:

man --html=calibre xyz

(where xyz is the command whose man page you want).

This sends an html-formatted man page directly to Calibre, where you can then convert to ePub. (I don't know if this works with all versions of man, but at least on Ubuntu 11.10 it does).

[linux_author]

Originally Posted by lambdax

Just found this thread through google. There's another way that works really well: use man to format the page as html and send it to Calibre:

man --html=calibre xyz

(where xyz is the command whose man page you want).

This sends an html-formatted man page directly to Calibre, where you can then convert to ePub. (I don't know if this works with all versions of man, but at least on Ubuntu 11.10 it does).

interesting, as i never knew there was an '--html' option... will have to try this (it obviously will *not* work under OS X)