*BSD News Article 33540


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From: toms@cais.cais.com (Tom Strickland Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Man Pages
Date: 31 Jul 1994 06:24:50 GMT
Organization: Capital Area Internet Service
Lines: 37
Message-ID: <31fg3i$of7@sun.cais.com>
References: <31cnj3$6cl@crl2.crl.com>
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Gordon Furbush (gfurbush@crl.com) wrote:

: Does anyone know of a way to create man pages without having to author 
: them using the -man macros?  It seems to me that it might be possible to 
: generate plain-text output from something a little more modern, like 
: FrameMake, then place them in a /man?.cat directory.

: Has anyone tried doing something like this?

Tell you how it is, man pages work quite well, on several different 
terminals because of the mark up in the text.  (It looks right on a VT100 
as well as a wyse 50.)  They are fairly simple to create, man -k will 
search to find what you need (it works!).    And all this comes with the 
unix system (unless you have unixware then you have problems).  So why 
would you want to take something that works so simply and so well, and 
format them with proprietary software like FrameMaker?  Btw can you have 
it search through the pages for you froma  simple command line interface?

On the other hand unixware says they are going to take an approach 
similar to waht you have suggested so their man pages will look go on a 
GUI machine.  That is great, but I have people who dail in, not a single 
GUI user, now what?  Are they going to be with out man pages?

While on the surface a slick GUI interface seems nice, especially to 
marketing, I perfer to have something that works well, doesnt require a 
cray for reasonable response, and I have create my only little (ever so 
humble) man pages and they work!

Sorry, I just am plain tired of having things fixed that are not "broke"


--
<TOM>

toms@cais.com

Computer advice is free.               As long as it doesn't cost anything.