On 2005 May 6, at 8:09 PM, Theo de Raadt wrote: > Everyone keeps saying docbook, xml, blah, blah, and then they produce > manual pages that are worse than ours. > > Perhaps it is time to consider how that happens.
Rhetorical question, I know, but for Mr. Gustavo's benefit.... Worry about the content. The format is the least of your concerns. When you have a problem that the standard format doesn't address, *then* it's time to start worrying about the format. Not before. I've done a fair share of graphic design over the years. In addition to the WYSIWYG tools like PageMaker and Xpress, I've also done stuff in ?roff, LaTeX, HTML, Word *shudder*.... Anyway, I assure you, the easy part is the layout and presentation. Converting from one format to another isn't that big a deal, either. For one-off stuff, some global search-and-destroy takes care of most of it. For mass conversions, if it's structured, you just have to write some wrapper code around your search-and-destroy patterns. The hard part is the actual content. A significant part of this is the organization and structure of your words. Get all that taken care of, and the content almost formats itself. Cheers, b& [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of PGP.sig]
