Re: creating man pages
On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 08:35:45AM +1100, Drew Parsons wrote:
> What's the "best" way of maintaining or creating a man page?
>
> I'll be needing to do that with some of my packages, but it just occurred to
> me I don't actually know how, apart from cutting and pasting in a text
> editor. My guess is there's a simple manpage editor out there, or a
> sensible emacs mode, so I wouldn't need to use anything so silly as a full
> SGML environment.
If you don't want to do SGML, you could always edit the nroff source directly.
This is what has been done historically. SGML, however, makes it easier to
render the manpage in different ways in the future.
The SGML environment you need (assuming you already have common things like the
stdc++ library) is less than 10mb (woody i386). That's not much on today's
disks. Although you don't strictly need this in order to edit the SGML source,
you need it in order to be able to translate the SGML manpage into nroff.
--
- mdz
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