About
Project TFM converts Debian man pages to nice and friendly HTML. The pages are linked using man page references and also grouped by Debian packages.
The actual converted man pages are not flawless and they will probably never be, as it would require large amount of effort to interpret them into correct HTML representation.
That is why this will be "beta" forever.
Search field
Go / Search field has support for wildcards. Star ("*") stands for zero or more characters. Question mark ("?") substitutes one arbitrary character.
Go button functions as man command. It lists search results if more
than one page is found.
Search just adds star on both sides of search term, thus not requiring exact match. Search always displays search results, even for one match.
How does it work
Three different engines are used to convert man pages:
- My own man2html Perl script. Very fast but does not work for many pages.
- Doclifter by Eric S. Raymond.
- The old rman. Works for every page but has visual errors.
These engines are run in order as listed above, falling back to next engine on errors.
Symlinks and pure '.so' includes are converted to page aliases in database.
Credits
TFM builds on following projects and technologies.
- Debian — source of all the content
- Python — most of the backend scripts
- Tornado — web server
- Postgres — database