WoMan was developed primarily on various versions of Microsoft Windows, but has also been tested on MS-DOS, and various versions of UNIX and GNU/Linux.
WoMan is distributed with GNU Emacs.
WoMan implements a subset of the formatting performed by the Emacs
man (or manual-entry) command to format a Unix-style
manual page (usually abbreviated to man page) for display,
but without calling any external programs. It is intended to emulate
the whole of the roff -man macro package, plus those roff
requests (see Background) that are most commonly used
in man pages. However, the emulation is modified to include the
reformatting done by the Emacs man command. No hyphenation is
performed.
Much more direct, does not require any external programs. Supports completion on man page names.
Not a complete emulation. Currently no support for eqn or
tbl. Slightly slower for large man pages (but usually faster for
small- and medium-size pages).
This browser works quite well on simple well-written man files. It
works less well on idiosyncratic files that “break the rules” or use
the more obscure roff requests directly. Current test results
are available in the file
woman.status.
WoMan supports the use of compressed man files via
auto-compression-mode by turning it on if necessary. But you may
need to adjust the user option woman-file-compression-regexp.
See Interface Options.
Brief help on the WoMan interactive commands and user options, all of
which begin with the prefix woman- (or occasionally
WoMan-), is available most easily by loading WoMan and then
either running the command woman-mini-help or selecting the WoMan
menu option ‘Mini Help’.
Guidance on reporting bugs is given below. See Reporting Bugs.