On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, Colin Watson wrote: > <snipped above discussion about troff>
I've had success writing man pages in POD, Perl's psuedo-documentation language. Even if you aren't familiar with Perl, POD may be easier to deal with with troff. Perl includes a program called pod2man which will convert the POD to troff for you. On top of that, I wrote a little script that does the conversion, renames everything properly (man's a stickler for having everything properly named), and sticks the finished pages into the appropriate directory. If you're interested, I can send you the source to a manpage I created with POD and you can look it over if you like. > Also have a look at /usr/share/doc/man-db/examples/manpage.example for > the basic structure. Whether you use POD or troff, have a look at the pod2man(1) man page, it has a lengthy section about how to write a good manpage, which applies to manpages in general. The Perl 5.6 pod2man page is better than the 5.005 version (which comes with stable), one place to find it is: http://www.osxfaq.com/man/1/pod2man.html (P.S. it's weird, but perldoc.com has the 5.003 manpage, which isn't nearly as good.) Good luck, Aaron -- So: My point is that [Microsoft] may have a ton of money and be more vicious than a junkyard dog, and have a stranglehold on dimwitted IS managers, but they're just not very _competent_. -- Rick Moen, on macosx-for-users
