Re: RFS: crotch

[Paul Cager <paul-debian@home.paulcager.org>]

Neil Williams wrote:
> There are plenty of tools that help create manpages without having to
> understand the Groff/troff format. help2man can take your STDOUT usage
> message and convert that to a usable manpage, doclifter can then take
> that manpage and create XML that is easier to edit and gives you
> instructions on how to use xsltproc to turn the XML back into a
> manpage.

I'm also trying to create a man page. help2man worked wonderfully
(thanks for the hint!), and doclifter produced good XML.

But it took me a while to work out how to convert back from XML to "man"
format - there were a couple of dead-ends. Apologies if everyone *else*
already knows this, but it might save a few people some wasted time...

I thought docbook2man (or docbook-to-man) would be the best way to do
it, but it can't handle the XML produced by doclifter (it only really
works for SGML). xmlto works, though:
   xmlto man thing.1.xml