Re: how to make the man formatting better.
On Sun, 2002-09-15 at 07:07, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 15, 2002 at 11:28:34AM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
> > also sprach Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> [2002.09.15.0354 +0200]:
> > > Most of Debian's man pages are written this way.
> >
> > So why does dh_make provide manpage.sgml.ex and even a commented
> > docbook-to-man call in debian/rules? The message I extracted from that
> > was "Debian really prefers you to use SGML for manpages..."
>
> dh_make has all kinds of weird ideas, and isn't even close to
> authoritative ... note that it also provides manpage.1.ex, though.
>
> --
> Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
>
>
> --
I would suspect that Debian does prefer SGML for manpages because SGML
is more of an *officially sanctioned* standard that is meant to be able
to produce output to a wide variety of presentation methods, while
groff, being unstructured (and from past experiences of troff from my
Unix days and runoff from my VMS days, not always absolutely consistent
in output produced and features supported/implemented) leaves room for
difficult to implement formatting decisions (primarily the errors, like
forgetting to switch off bold or italics,) and requires translations
that may not always be faithful when you want to draw upon viewers such
as a web browser (although I salute the performance of man2html on this
matter.)
--
Mark L. Kahnt, FLMI/M, ALHC, HIA, AIAA, ACS, MHP
ML Kahnt New Markets Consulting
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