Re: how to write a man page?
On Wed, 08 Sep 1999, Bill White wrote:
> There is some way to use sgml2txt -man, or so the documentation
> says. However, last weekend when I was working on a manpage for a
> program I'm writing I was unable to get it to work sensibly. Does
> anybody know how this is supposed to work? Is there documentation I
> have not seen?
I fear that it isn't a good idea to create man pages with sgml2txt,
because a man page has a very "stiff" format (special sections etc.)
which you cannot trivially reproduce with SGML. So if you want to
write a man page in SGML, this means that you have to use exactly the
man page sections and IMHO this is much harder than directly write a
man page in nroff format.
BTW: It sounds much harder to write a man page than it really is. You
shouldn't look at automatically generated man pages (those are often
really unreadable), but look at manually created man pages. These use
only 10-20 special nroff man macros and are very easy to write.
Have a look at the Man-Page-HOWTO (new URL:
http://www.schweikhardt.net/man_page_howto.html) and you will see how
easy this is.
And if you really want to use some different format, you may have a
look at docbook, where some docbook2man converters are available. I
didn't check this myself, but it sounds usable...
Ciao
Roland
--
* roland@spinnaker.de * http://www.spinnaker.de/ *
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