Re: Manual pages

       From: Basile STARYNKEVITCH <basile@soleil>
       Subject: Re: Manual pages

> Gavin Nicol <gtn@ebt.com> wrote:
>
> #> References: <"Dave Hudson(039)s message of Tue*"@MHS>
> #>
> #> I certainly haven't written any manual pages yet. Actually, I question
> #> whether the normal nroff format is a good or bad idea. I think we have
> #> the technology available now to do something a little better.
>
> Perhaps HTML would be an interesting candidate. Also, gnu texi or info
> files could be ok. I do agree than nroff is not a very interesting
> online documentation format.
 
  At Cygnus we're using texinfo. This single source we translate using
filters to info, dvi, ps, and now html. We're putting all the GNU docs
up under WWW. URL=http://www.cygnus.com/ I'd suggest we use info for online
docs. [tng]roff is tolerable for exisiting man pages, but I just started
trying "RosettaMan" which translates nroff to html. (works good too).

> My biaised opinion is for GNU texinfo format --but it is just because
> i know it better. I don't know much about HTML (but did read books on
> SGML upon which, as i understand, is based HTML; i found SGML much too
> complex to be really interesting!).

  I just learned HTML last week, I find it generally *much* easier to write
than raw nroff. Nroff is pretty dense to write in, at least in HTML it's
easier to read the doc source and figure out what it does.

        - rob -
Received on Tue May 10 07:08:28 1994