manbook <MANPAGE>
manbook <MANPAGE1> [<MANPAGE2> ...]
manbook <MANPAGE> --output <DIRECTORY>
manbook <MANPAGE1> [<MANPAGE2> ...] --output <DIRECTORY>
manbook --all --output <DIRECTORY>

mktoc <DIRECTORY>

The manbook command can be used to produce an eBook from one or more man pages.

mktoc produces table-of-content files, suitable for MOBI files (Kindle, etc) from the HTML files in a directory.

gem install manbook
manbook --help
mktoc --help

manbook expects to be passed the name of one or more man pages. It will use the MANPATH environment variable to find the man page and convert it to HTML.

If more than one man page was passed, an additional index page will be created. If the man pages are from different sections, manbook will create separate indexes by section together with an index file for each section.

You can specify an individual man page or a list of man pages using a few options.

• -o, --output: Specifies the output file (when operating on a single man page) or the output directory (when operating on multiple man pages) where the HTML files will be written to.

• -a, --all: Produce a book with all man pages found.

See manbook --help to view the options at any time.

gem install manbook

manbook ls
manbook ls grep bash --output ./my-favorite-pages/
manbook -a -o ./manpages/

mktoc ./my-favorite-pages/
mktoc --title "Kindle and the Fourty Amazons" ./my-favorite-pages/

The manbook command returns with exit code other than 0 (zero) if one or more man pages could not be found or converted. If all goes well, the exit code will be 0.

After I bought a Kindle, the idea was born to put the man pages of my Mac onto my Kindle. My requirements are:

1. Input should be exactly the man pages on /my/ system, not someone else's FreeBSD or whathever
2. Should respect my MANPATH (not just look in /usr/share/man)
3. Pages should be as plain-text as possible (no PDF).
4. eBook should provide an index with a list of all man pages by section and by name

When I looked around for an existing solution, all I found was:

• http://askubuntu.com/questions/21903/man-pages-offline-for-e-reader
• http://www.macgeekery.com/tips/cli/pretty-print_manual_pages_as_ps_pdf_or_html

and a few other, not-quite-complete scripts. None of them satisfied my requirements, so I decided to write my own tool. Thus, manbook was born.

Requires the groff script to be in your path and executable.

Requires Ruby and RubyGems.

Please report other bugs at http://github.com/nerab/manbook/issues

• Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet
• Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it
• Fork the project
• Start a feature/bugfix branch
• Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution
• Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
• Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.

manbook is Copyright (C) 2011 Nicolas E. Rabenau. See LICENSE.txt for further details.

groff(1), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_page, mail2kindle