Since May 2002, Netpbm does not have traditional man pages for documentation. BUT YOU CAN CONFIGURE NETPBM, IF YOU WANT, SO YOU GET ESSENTIALLY THE SAME 'MAN' FUNCTION AS WITH A TRADITIONAL UNIX PACKAGE. Netpbm's maintainer believes man pages are obsolete and too limiting, and doesn't have time to maintain the documentation in multiple formats. So instead of classic nroff man page format, the Netpbm documentation is available as HTML, with one HTML file per program, plus some others. The current user manual is accessible on the World Wide Web at , and if it's practical for you, you should access it there instead of making a local copy. This manual is always up to date. It is not maintained on a release schedule like the source code is, but rather updated continuously. The user manual describes past Netpbm function as well as the present, so you can use the current manual with old Netpbm code. INSTALLING A LOCAL COPY OF DOCUMENTATION ---------------------------------------- If accessing the manual on the World Wide Web is not convenient for you (for example, if you want to access it from a computer that is not always connected to the Internet), just make a local copy of the HTML files. You can get the files from the Subversion repository using the Subversion client program 'svn': URL=https://netpbm.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/netpbm/userguide svn export $URL This creates a directory "userguide" in your current directory containing all the same files that are on the web site. And a sometimes more convenient way to get those files from the Subversion repository is to get Sourceforge's Viewvc service to make a tarball of them: wget http://netpbm.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/netpbm/userguide.tar.gz?view=tar --output-document=/tmp/userguide.tgz An apparent alternative is just to copy the web site with something like GNU Wget. However, the Sourceforge web server has limitations on how much you can download. In a February 2012 experiment, Sourceforge started refusing HTTP requests (with an Internal Server Error indication and a message saying there had been too many requests) before all the files could be fetched. GETTING COMMAND HELP WITH A "MAN" COMMAND ----------------------------------------- You can get the same quick access to program documentation with this HTML setup as with traditional man pages, using the Manweb program. This works whether you use the www copy or a local copy of the HTML files. Manweb is distributed with Netpbm. With Manweb and Netpbm installed and configured appropriately (see below), you can type man netpbm and get the top level page of the Netpbm user manual (with hyperlinks to all the other pages), or man netpbm ppmtogif or man ppmtogif to go straight to the Ppmtogif documentation. Installnetpbm normally installs Manweb and the netpbm.url file that Manweb needs to find the Netpbm documentation. Through the Configure dialog, or editing config.mk, you determine whether Manweb accesses the master web copy or a local copy you installed. Installnetpbm installs the program as 'manweb'. If you want to invoke it as 'man', you'll have to set that up yourself. Perhaps with a symbolic link from 'man' to 'manweb'. Note that 'manweb' is mostly backward compatible with 'man' so that this is a reasonable thing to do. Manweb can find documentation on the web, in HTML files, in GNU info files, and in traditional man pages. In a standard installation of Netpbm, Installnetpbm also creates a traditional man page for every Netpbm program it installs, but the man page just tells you to go to the HTML file. This way, even if the "man" program isn't capable of reading the HTML documentation and even if the user doesn't know specifically where Netpbm documentation lives, he isn't stranded without information. VIEWING NETPBM DOC WITH TRADITIONAL MAN PROGRAM ----------------------------------------------- Some people want to be able to access the Netpbm documentation with an existing man program that doesn't know HTML. You can install the documentation that way, with some loss of quality. There are two ways: 1) convert the HTML to troff with the 'makeman' program in the 'buildtools' directory of the Netpbm source tree. This is a Python program. 2) convert the HTML to formatted plain text (suitable as man "cat" pages) with the 'makecat' program in the 'buildtools' directory of the Netpbm source tree. This program just does a 'lynx -dump'. The "loss of quality" mentioned above is because: - The classic Unix manual format isn't as expressive as the worldwide web format; you can't convert down losslessly. - There is less maintenance effort put into maintaining the secondary non-web format. It requires certain idioms to be followed in the HTML source and lists of man pages to be separately maintained. This maintenance is essentially done on a fault basis -- when someone notices the Unix man pages aren't right, he fixes something. Bear in mind that the person who writes most of the Netpbm documentation updates never sees the troff versions; he uses Manweb, which renders directly from the HTML. Also, these methods require manual effort, and technical understanding, on your part to set up. Setting it up is too complex for an automated process to do it for you with any significant integrity. The examples are guidelines and you shouldn't expect them to work literally in your situation. Here is an old example of making troff pages, which doesn't actually work anymore, but might be helpful. You'll probably want to use a Subversion export of the manual instead of a Wget download (see above). mkdir netpbmdoc cd netpbmdoc wget --recursive --relative http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ cd netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc make MAKEMAN=/usr/src/netpbm/buildtools/makeman \ -f /usr/src/netpbm/buildtools/manpage.mk manpages make -f /usr/src/netpbm/buildtools/manpage.mk installman cd ../../.. rm -r netpbmdoc man ppmtogif Here is an example of making "cat" pages: mkdir netpbmdoc cd netpbmdoc wget --recursive --relative http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/ cd netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc /usr/src/netpbm/buildtools/makecat *.html cp *.1 /usr/man/cat1/ cd ../../.. rm -r netpbmdoc man ppmtogif DOCBOOK ------- You can turn the Netpbm user manual into Docbook XML pages using Doclifter. Because Doclifter works on troff pages, you have to convert the documentation down to troff first, which means the Docbook pages are of lower quality than the main HTML documentation. To create Docbook XML, follow the example above for creating troff pages, and use 'make xmlpages' instead of 'make manpages'.