How to Download Official Man Pages from Ubuntu for Offline Viewing

downloadsmanpage

I am talking about this Precise Man Pages.

From here i want the entire available English Language Man pages as it is , so i can view them offline in the same format .Simply Browser way, which also makes it portable for reditribution.

I am aware that it can be accessed through command line , but the Official site provides attractive description (makes a beginner like me less afraid in reading, learning and understanding them).

By what means and in what way should it be done to achieve the desired Man Pages in same Format.

Using Ubuntu 12.04 64-Bit edition.

P.S.: Also is there any way of knowing its size before downloading it.

Best Answer

The man pages are usually get installed with software. So, If you install a software with manpages, the manpages will be automatically installed.

Manual pages in a Web browser

By installing man2html

You can install man2html package to your computer to view the manual pages in your favorite browser:
```
sudo apt-get install man2html
```
By installing doc-central

There is another tool which view manpages in browser, it is called doccentral. You can install it with the following command:
```
sudo apt-get install doc-central
```

Downloading manual pages:

You can download the latest manual pages from here. The size was also included in the page

Manual pages in PDF !:

Yes, you can even get the manual pages in pdf file format. for example, if you want to generate manual page for man the command will be :

man -t man | ps2pdf - man.pdf.

This will generate a manual page, named man.pdf in the current directory of the terminal. replace man with your desired one, such as grep or apt-get etc.

Info pages in browser.

Though it is not asked in the question, I include it as general reference.

You can also have the GNU info pages (which are more elaborate and helpful) in a web browser by installing info2www package. The command is below:

sudo apt-get install info2www

Hope this will help

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Man pages offline for e-reader

This bash command will dump HTML files for every man page on the system. You'll need to install the groff package first, then cd to an empty directory and run:

for f in `ls -1 /usr/share/man/man*`; do n=`echo $f | sed s/[.].*[.]gz//`; man -Thtml $n > $n.html ; done

This will cycle through all of the files in the /usr/share/man directory, strip off the section number and the extension using sed, then call man to render the manpage to HTML (man -Thtml in turn calls groff, which is why you need it installed first), storing the result in an html file with the same name as the page. It will take a while to complete, and groff throws some warnings about line breaks, but when it finishes, you will have all of your man pages in HTML format.

Most e-readers can handle HTML files, but if yours doesn't, you can use calibre to convert the HTML files to mobi or epub or any other format you choose.

Ubuntu – How to view the man pages

To view a manual page related to a package, open a terminal (press Ctrl+Alt+T together) and type:

man <package_name>

For example, to view grep's manual page, type:

man grep

This will open the manual page referring to the section numbers in the order:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

If you want to open the manual page of a specific section, type:

man <section_number> <package_name>

For example, to open the manual page of the open() function in C, you should type:

man 2 open

More information:

Refer to the the manual page for man.
Search through Ubuntu Manpages at: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/.