On Wed, Dec 13, 2000 at 10:24:01AM +1100, Drew Parsons wrote: > I wouldn't necessarily mind using SGML, but which tools exactly do you use. > For creating man pages I mean. How do you generate them from SGML?
I use emacs/psgml to edit, and the docbook-to-man package to generate nroff. > As for editing nroff source, that's what I meant with my first question. Is > there no editor for this sort of thing? For handling all the fiddly things > like section breaks and bold text, etc, so I don't have to learn nroff itself. Well, nroff is a full-featured document formatting system, so it can be used for many other things besides man pages. Man pages use a specific set of nroff macros to get the traditional formatting, but (as far as I know), there is no formal syntactical description for these macros, as there is with SGML DTDs. So while a competent editor could appropriately syntax-highlight nroff as a language, it probably couldn't know whether you're writing a syntactically correct man page. In other words, there are 'nroff-aware' editors, but no 'man-aware' editors (that I know of). However, the two are not entirely dissimilar. You don't really have to learn all of nroff; reading some example man pages and referring to man(7) and/or groff_man(7) should be sufficient. But if you're comfortable with SGML, do that. Also, your messages seem to be going out with a bogus 'Sender: ' address. -- - mdz
