Re: writing man pages or texinfo documentation
On Tue, May 25, 1999 at 10:25:30AM +0200, Mark Kettenis wrote:
> A good manual, divided in chapters and sections, with an index and cross
> references is a much better way to structure the information in a, for the
> user, logical way.
Info isn't exactly ideal. Why not use a different solution, as we're
starting over?
IMHO, neither emacs-info nor the standalone info viewer are sufficiently
friendly for beginners---even I have difficulty remembering the info
commands, whereas "man" uses my default pager. Info is
unattractive---"links" aren't obvious---and texinfo isn't exactly the
simplest format to write. Most Linux distributions now provide a graphical
info reader; either tkinfo or some variation on info2www. So:
As everybody knows how to use "The Web", why not use SGML as the "standard"
documentation format? That way, we can convert to HTML for interactive
info-style viewing using Lynx, Netscape or another browser of choice (or for
Web publishing, obviously), we can produce a printable version, and we can
produce a flat-text version that "man" could show using a pager.
Problem solved. Uh, right. I'm sure there's at least one problem I haven't
forseen...
--
Adam Sampson
azz@josstix.demon.co.uk
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