Meg McRoberts wrote:
One small thought about man page compatibility... We have a fundamental
problem between Linux and most Unix systems because of the section-naming
differences. I have never figured out a good way around that. My current
job includes responsibility for a handful of man pages about applications
that run on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. For Windows, I just run the text
into a PDF file and publish it. And I don't have a good solution for what
to do about man pages for Linux and Solaris -- all the information may be
the same but file formats are section 5 on Linux and section 4 on Solaris;
administrative commands are section 8 on Linux and section 1M on Solaris.
The problem is Berkeley Unix vs. AT&T Unix. AT&T put admin commands
in section 1M and file formats in section 4. Berkeley put them in
8 and 5. Linux apparently followed the Berkeley convention. HP made
the change from Berkeley to the AT&T arrangement at HP-UX 5.0 in 1985,
and it appears that Solaris (and I assume AIX) also follows that
convention. I have no clue why the Linux crowd took the Berkeley
route. Maybe it's a "California thing"?
As for the larger discussions, most of what I'm writing does not need any
fancy formatting. I would love to know the basic set of codings I can use
that are pretty likely to work on any system. I might some day decide to
use something that isn't so portable but I wouldn't accidentally do that.
meg
In all of my manpage work, I used .TH, .SH, .SS, .TP, .IP, .RS, .RE,
.B, .BR, .RB, .IR, .RI, .BI, .IB, and a set I created for "computer
font" (Courier): .CI, .IC, .RC, .CR (.BC and .CB were never needed
because the C family was used in syntax and Bold was never used in
that context). I don't recall using any others. I sometimes used
\c at the end of a line when I ran out of space (I tried to keep
lines under about 70 characters in source text) and needed to have
no whitespace between words/arguments. .ne, .br, and an occasional
.bp (maybe) were about all of the low-level requests I ever used.
I used .PP instead of .P for paragraphs. I may have occasionally
used .ce, but it was very rare, if ever.
I also included tables and equations (.TS, .TE, and the equation
begin/end labels (.EQ and .EE ? -- don't recall what they were),
but never had any real problems. To split tables across pages, I
tried to arrange the tables so they worked correctly on troff and
man(1)/nroff formatting by using .if n and .if t requests to get
correct paging breaks.
I wrote a shell script that used vi and ran sed inside of vi
non-interactively (vi $file <vi_commands_file and inside of that
file I used a line: 1G followed by !Gsed -f sedfile to run the
entire file through sed with sedfile containing the sed commands).
Worked like a charm and got rid of all of the \fR, \fB, \fI, etc.
junk and changed it all to macro calls (.BR, .IR, etc.). I could
overhaul 1000 files in 5 minutes on a 30 Mhz processor. We didn't
have 2-GHz machines back in the 1980s!
And people wonder why I don't like Windows. :-) Sheesh!
Clarke (principle author of "The Ultimate Guide to the Vi and Ex
Text Editors")
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