GNU groff wrapper taking UTF-8 encoded manual pages

Here is an extension of groff that permits to view UTF-8 encoded man pages. It installs a new command "groff-utf8", which has the same command line options as groff. The supported output devices are "utf8" (denoting a tty device in UTF-8 encoding, such as xterm, rxvt, or gnome-terminal) and "html".

Prerequisite

groff 1.18.1 or newer.

Installation

  $ tar xvfz groff-utf8.tar.gz
  $ cd groff-utf8
  $ make
  $ make install PREFIX=/usr/local      # Choose a PREFIX directory in such
                                        # a way that $PREFIX/bin is in your
                                        # $PATH.

Sample use

  $ groff-utf8 -Tutf8 -mandoc find.vi.1 | less
  $ groff-utf8 -Thtml -mandoc find.vi.1 > find.html; mozilla find.html

You can also in /etc/manpath.config edit the definitions of the variables troff and nroff, to use groff-utf8 instead of groff.

Of course this is only a stopgap measure, until groff can process UTF-8 encoded man pages by itself, sometime in the future.

Download

http://www.haible.de/bruno/gnu/groff-utf8.tar.gz

groff-utf8 package
Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>

Last modified: 5 July 2005.