Amazon Kindle (Scribe) - Manual Page to HTML/EPUB
2025.04.08
WORK IN PROGRESS

These are some updated notes for converting Linux manual pages to HTML for sending via Amazon "Send to Kindle", or converting directly to EPUB.

As I can recall, the best HTML producing rendering method was VIM.

The following examples utilize the Dash manual page, a minimal Bourne Shell scripting language.

SED
$ sed 's/\(background-color\|color\): #[A-Z|a-z|0-9]\{6\}; //g' test.html

GROFF
$ cat /usr/share/man/man1/dash.1 | groff -mandoc -Thtml > dash-man.html

VIM (Preferred Method)
First set color theme to basic ":colorscheme basic" and ":set bg=light", and enter ":TOhtml" command.

Lastly, save the VIM converted text to HTML file.  Great for converting source code text files to HTML.

VIM Command Line (Not Tested)
$ vim -E -s -c "let g:html_no_progress=1" -c "syntax on" -c "set ft=html" -c "runtime syntax/2html.vim" -c "colorscheme=basic" -c "set bg=light" -cwqa file.txt


NOTE: The rendered HTML file will likely require further editing, adjusting the title tag for Amazon Send To Kindle for providing a good book title.