Re: Manual pages

Dave Hudson wrote:

>Having written a few man pages for Linux I found I could pick up roff formats
>reasonably well - the other's all look huge. I just downloaded the SGML

Maybe the formatter would be reasonable, but for example I can't write
roff. It's too complex and unreadable.

>tools that the Linux document crowd are using to convert SGML to just about
>everything else (HTML coming soon apparently) and the compressed sources
>alone were 340k :-( I think there'd be a practical difficulty there as well

Me too. That's not the place to explain, but they are on the wrong way.
Therefor the system is exploding.

>as I think it uses flex/lex to build some of the sources (I've no idea about

Wrong. No lex or similar.

>lex so I don't know how easy/difficult it would be to get it running on
>VSTa).

I can't see any problem.

>I like the idea that maybe we could find or build a utility to convert roff
>to one of these more general (I think) formatting systems.

No chance. SGML for example describes the structure of the doc, as the
Name of the programm, the synopsis, the references. But it is no
formatting system at all. A separete system has to be used to
describe, how the parts are to be formatted (like name is in tt font,
synopsis is separated by blank line and has a heading SYNOPSIS)

>Anyway if there are no overriding objections to the locations I suggested
>I'll start writing a few server man pages.

Many Thanks for that.

Dave Hudson wrote:

> I have one, it's called RosettaMan. It translates nroff to html, sgml,
>ascii, or roff. It's also *really* tiny. You can get it from:
>ftp.cs.berkeley.edu:/ucb/people/phelps/tcl/rman.tar.Z.

Sound's interesting. But I can't believe that it translates to SGML.
That would require to be intelligent, course it would transform to a
higher level of abstraction (or it uses non-good DTD like HTML).
Received on Wed May 11 00:19:59 1994