How to parse man pages in Windows?

Question

Here is a raw man page. Is there a way I can parse it under Windows to make it more readable?

Answer 1

Seems like this manioc suite of tools would work for you:

Manual pages, also called man pages, are a well supported, popular way to document software in Unix, BSD, and GNU/Linux operating systems. A text formatter program is required to process the intrinsic formats of man pages into other formats suitable for viewing. GNU/Linux systems typically use groff and some BSD systems, like OpenBSD for example, use mandoc suite of programs as a text formatter. To view man pages in Windows, however, you still need a formatting program. Hence we have decided to build for Windows the main programs of mandoc suite and put together the binaries for download with a short explanation on usage and building from sources.

Answer 2

I am affiliated with the webpage that JakeGould have posted in his answer. I have ported the essence of mandoc suite to Windows (MinGW/MSYS) and I have created that page. My thanks to the authors and contributors of mandoc suite and MinGW/MSYS! So you have 3 options:

1. Go to my page Viewing man pages in Windows and MinGW/MSYS, read the disclaimer :) please, download the zip-file with pre-built binaries, for example mdocml-1.13.1-win32-embedeo-02.zip, extract locally and then run either of the following commands on Windows command line (cmd.exe) with your man-page as an argument:

   mandoc.exe openvpn.8 | more
   

   or, my preferred way, convert to an html page:

   mandoc.exe -Thtml -Oman=%N.%S.html openvpn.8 > openvpn.8.html
   

   Besides, it is a good idea to be aware of mandoc, if you ever come across the idea of writing your own man-pages. In my view, mandoc suite is superior to a roff-only tool set and a better "common denominator" from author's perspective.

2. However if your man-page is overly "traditional" roff, or if you are not happy with mandoc's formatting, you might want to format/view your man-page with GNU troff (groff). For example, you can get groff pre-built binaries for Windows from ezwinports.

3. You can search for an online html variant of your man-page. However I would not recommend this option, because there is always risk that the online document might cover different version of the software than the version that you have locally.