Install man2html with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• man2html

Project history

The official NonGNU page says man2html was maintained solely by Earl Hood before it became a Savannah project in May 2003. The last pre-Savannah public release was version 3.0.1 in 1997, which the project continued to make available from CPAN-era distribution locations and the Savannah download area.

After the Savannah move, the project lived in GNU Savannah's NonGNU infrastructure with CVS, mailing-list archives, and project downloads. That makes it a small but historically useful bridge between roff manual pages and early web-based documentation browsing.

Adoption history

man2html appears in traditional Unix and Linux packaging because it solves a narrow problem with few moving parts: convert formatted manual-page output into HTML, optionally behind a CGI interface. Its package-manager role is mostly as a compatibility utility rather than a modern documentation platform.

Homebrew, Debian, Fedora, Arch, and Ubuntu package names show continuing downstream availability even though the upstream history is sparse and old.

How it is used

The CLI reads formatted nroff from standard input and emits HTML on standard output, which makes it naturally scriptable with `man`, `nroff`, or documentation-generation jobs. The CGI component is for hypertext navigation over installed man pages.

Because it works on formatted nroff rather than owning a whole man-page database, man2html is often paired with existing manual systems rather than replacing them.

Why package nerds care

man2html is package-nerd interesting because it preserves an older Unix documentation pattern: turn local manual pages into web pages without introducing a large documentation stack.

Its official sources are thin, so the safe history is short: Earl Hood maintenance, a 1997 pre-Savannah release, and migration to Savannah in 2003.

Timeline

• 1997: Last pre-Savannah public release, version 3.0.1.
• 2003: man2html became a Savannah project.
• 2003: The official NonGNU page records the Savannah, CVS, and mailing-list project links.

Related projects

• man2html sits beside man-db, mandoc, groff, nroff, and CGI manual-page browsers in the Unix documentation ecosystem.
• Its role overlaps with HTML output modes in newer tools such as mandoc, but its design is simpler and older.

Sources

• https://savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=man2html
• https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/man2html
• https://www.nongnu.org/man2html/
• source_facts.package-manager