MAN-RECODE(1)

✨ MAN-RECODE(1) ✨

Manual pager utils 💖

🌸 NAME 🌸

man-recode - convert manual pages to another encoding 🦋

💅 SYNOPSIS 💅

man-recode -t to-code {--suffix=suffix|--in-place} [-dqhV] [filename]

📖 DESCRIPTION 📖

okay so man-recode converts multiple manual pages from one encoding to another, and it's smart enough to guess the right input encoding for each page 🧚 it's literally the move when you need to permanently recode pages written in legacy character sets, or when your build system needs every page recoded to one shared encoding (usually UTF-8) before installing ✨ and when you're converting a whole pile of pages, this program is way faster than running man --recode or manconv on each page one by one 💨

so here's the vibe check for encodings: if the very first line of a manual page has an encoding declaration, that declaration is used as the input encoding for that page 🎀 if there isn't one, it guesses based on the file name 🔍

encoding declarations look like this:

'\" -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-

or, if manual page preprocessors also need to be declared, like this:

'\" t -*- coding: ISO-8859-1 -*-

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -t encoding, --to-code=encoding — convert the manual pages to encoding 💜
• --suffix=suffix — make each output file name by tacking suffix onto the input file name, after stripping off any compression extension 🍓
• --in-place — overwrite each input file with the converted output, after stripping off any compression extension ⚠️
• -q, --quiet — don't throw error messages when a page can't be converted 🙈
• -d, --debug — print debugging info 🔍
• -h, --help — print a help message and exit 🫶
• -V, --version — show version info 🌈

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

iconv(1), man(1), manconv(1) ✨

🐛 BUGS 🐛

reporting bugs is a love language, so here's where to send them 🫶

• https://gitlab.com/man-db/man-db/-/issues
• https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?group=man-db

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org). iconic behavior, honestly 💅

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version 2.13.1, dated 2025-05-02, bestie. you're welcome 🌈💖