Man page

A standard for presenting software documentation in, the UNIX manual page format is a simple ASCII type text file that features a few control codes alongside formatting conventions that help to organise and display the documentation on different devices. This form of documentation often shows up with software packages ported from UNIX or UNIX-like operating systems.

UNIX manual pages can be viewed with any text editor. But for formatted output a special viewer accompanied with a working text formatting system is required.

Tools

OS/2 text & programmers editors with man file support

• Elvis - Man file syntax support included by default - Open source - Current

OS/2 text formatter

• awf - nroff-like for old ms-sh
• Cawf - nroff-like text formatter
• GNU groff 1.10 - working version together with man 1.1
• tmf

OS/2 utilities for viewing man pages

• DrMan 1.3 - PM viewer that allos you to view UNIX style man and info files.
• Simple Man - Viewer
• GNU man 1.0 - Viewer - Outdated
• GNU man 1.1 - Viewer (also needs a pager)
• xman - X11 based viewer included in XFree86/2

OS/2 utilities for converting man pages

• Man2TXT - Man to text converter
• Help2man - Converts text to man format, used to convert a programs output to man pages or to create dummy man pages.

DOS text & programmers editors with man file support

• Elvis - Man file syntax support included by default - Open source - Current

The above is not an exhaustive list BTW.

Links

• History of UNIX man pages
• Unix Programmer's Manual (1971-11-03) 1st Edition