Hi,
I've found a few quirks with the man page conversion:
1. It's not possible to specify the man page output format. macOS' man page viewer doesn't like UTF-8 and unfortunately things like quotes and dashes in the Sphinx are not displayed when using "man" to view the result. In my case it was possible to post-process the man page using something like
iconv -f UTF-8 -t ascii//TRANSLIT utf8.1.orig > ascii.1
because most of the UTF-8 characters only came from quotes and dashes. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to handle bullets, reverse single quotes and the like.
Additionally, if you do such a conversion like this you will also need to take care and escape lines in the .1 file that also started with a quote in the source restructured text document.
2. In regular man pages you get lines like this (taken from the GNU grep man page):
-A num, --after-context=num
-A and --after-context are bold, num is underlined. In a Sphinx conversion the whole lot seems to be bold.
3. When choosing to underline things Sphinx will break the underlining at a space and continue it when the next letter starts. This is correct in things like SYNTAX sections but looks odd when dealing with nested headings...