• Description
• Installation
• Usage
• Documentation
• Contributing
• License

A simple CLI tool to display (or save) man pages as PDFs files for an easier reading.
Zaman first looks for the default PDF reader defined in XDG MIME Applications and fallback to Zathura if no default PDF reader is set.
It also allows to navigate through all the man pages available on the system through a dynamic menu via Rofi or Dmenu.

Install the zaman AUR package (also check the list of optional dependencies for anything you may want or need).

Install dependencies:

• Replace zathura-pdf-poppler by zathura-pdf-mupdf if you prefer to use the mupdf backend.
• Replace rofi by dmenu if you prefer to use that (provided by the suckless-tools package on Debian / Ubuntu).
• The second line are build dependencies (not required to run zaman once it is installed).

sudo apt install man-db groff xdg-utils zathura zathura-pdf-poppler rofi
sudo apt install make bats scdoc

sudo dnf install man-db groff groff-perl "perl(Compress::Zlib)" xdg-utils zathura zathura-pdf-poppler rofi
sudo dnf install make bats scdoc

sudo pacman -S man-db groff xdg-utils zathura zathura-pdf-poppler rofi
sudo pacman -S --asdeps make bats scdoc

sudo apk add man-db groff xdg-utils zathura zathura-pdf-poppler rofi
sudo apk add make bats scdoc

sudo emerge man-db groff xdg-utils zathura zathura-pdf-poppler rofi
sudo emerge make bats scdoc

Download the archive of the latest stable release and extract it (alternatively, you can clone this repository with git).

To install zaman, go into the extracted/cloned directory and run the following command:

sudo make
sudo make test
sudo make install

Once the installation is complete, you may optionally clean up the directory of files generated during installation by running the following command:

sudo make clean

To uninstall zaman, go into the extracted/cloned directory and run the following command:

sudo make uninstall

Run the zaman command in your terminal to display a list of all the available man pages on your system in a dynamic menu (via Rofi or Dmenu), allowing you to search for the one to display as a PDF.

Alternatively, you can directly specify the man page to open in the command (example below with the "ls" man page):

The man page is opened as a PDF file in the default PDF reader defined in XDG Mime Applications or in Zathura if no default PDF reader is set.

You can export a specific man page in a PDF file called "man_command.pdf" in your current directory with the -O (or --save) option (if you run zaman -O without specifying which man page to save, zaman will offer you to select one via rofi / dmenu):

Alternatively, you can specify the destination file with the -o (or --output) option:

See zaman --help and the zaman(1) man page.

See the contributing guidelines.

zaman is licensed under the GPL-3.0 license (or any later version of that license).