Unix Man Pages in Windows

Slarti: We presume that your using one of the 31 variations of Unix, and that being the case, there are not programs, not even shareware or trialware, that will read a *man* file in windows 95 as WIN95 requires a gateway to even approach any of the files on a Unix based system. We are a Microsoft Solutions Provider, and the only system build that we have available to accomplish this would be NT workstation with service pack 3 installed along with LAN manager and Unix Gateway interpreter.

Best regards,
Dennis

Sorry for the misunderstanding. What I want is a program that will view .man files, in the Unix .man format, but the actual files will be on my local hard disk. The reason I want this is that I would like to be able to read documents written in this format, without logging on to the internet.

Slarti: I didn't post this as an answer YET, but when you are on the Internet, what do you use to view these pages?

When I am on the 'net, I can view the files by loggin into Unix and viewing them with the man command, but that's not what I want to do. I want to read the file offline (like offline browsing). Do do that, I download the .man file (using FTP, or something), and then I view it. But it has all kinds of weird commands for making underlines and stuff, which is why I want a Windows program to view the file correctly.

Ok, I don't have or know of any man-page viewer for Win95, but I'll tell you a good solution. For the commands that you want to download to your computer, when in the unix shell do the following in your download/upload directory:
man <command> > command.txt
e.g., man socket > socket.txt
then download the *.txt files. This file is almost pure ascii now, with almost all of the man format crud taken out, there is one character which it doesn't take out, but you can easily just select the character (it's a two character non alpha-numeric string) and do a replace all with a blank character and everything is totally viewable.
Hope this makes life a little more bearable for you,
Robin (twexperts)

twexperts, thank you for your suggestion. However, I am keeping the question open in the hopes that someone out there knows of a program that does exactly what I want.

Slarti, we understand your need to find a solution, however what you do not seem to undertsand is that the Windows 95 code does *not* allow for any form on Unix integration. The only possible solution would be for you to use a server based workstation thats running Windows 95, which will allow Unix to run in the background. Windows 95 will not run on the same system with Unix running in the background. You can dual boot with Unix in a different directory, but thats it! An interpreter cannot be written for Windows 95 due to the code disparity!

dew associates, you do not understand my question at all. I do not need any form of a "unix interpreter" as you called it. I don't know why you keep coming back to the problem of running unix and win95 simultaneously - that is not at all what I want.

There are PC programs that display, for example, Mac graphics formats (like PICT). These programs don't expect you to run System 7 on your PC in order to work. They assume you've somehow gotten the PICT file into your PC, and just open it using the PICT specification. This is exactly what I am looking for: a program that will open _a PC file_ written in the man format. it doesn't have to run unix. it doesn't have to connect to a remote computer. all it has to do is understand the unix control characters underline and boldface, and display them correctly. i hope I have made myself clear (I don't see what the difficulty in understanding is).

Slarti: I understand completely what you are asking for, and it is you, for the record, who does not understand the lack of interrelationship between Windows 95 SDK code and Unix. They, unlike Mac, are like oil and water. Going back to your comment about Mac Pict formats, that is simplied dos code with machine language custom designed to run Mac generational code. A pic is a pic, you only need a graphics generator thats able to convert that code to something recognizable to your system. And, that CANNOT be done for Unix as none of the 31 variations of Unix has a way of converting that code to a format that can be read in any dos based system. This is why Microsoft developed, and Netscape, among others, developed different scripting technologies so that Explorer and Netscape could read the pages you see on a Unix based system. It's called HTML. If you want to view these pages correctly, you'll have to download them as HTML.