[TUHS] man-page style

[Otto Moerbeek]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 11:52:38PM -0700, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:

> Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> > I think that's somewhat backwards in he spirit of 'UNIX'...  the man and
> > info pages should reference the manual in /usr/doc/foo/
> 
> The goal for Info was to *be* the equivalent of /usr/doc/foo. Along the
> way the default for Info changed to go to the 'invoking' section of a
> manual so that you saw the options, arguably the most immediately
> useful part of a man page, attempting to give the user the best of both
> worlds.
> 
> All that said, I think this topic has been beaten to death. Info
> did not successfully replace man pages.  As a file format, I think
> that Info has very little left to offer.
> 
> What I do *love* is the Texinfo markup language, which is wonderful
> for producing book-style documents.  And what's nice is that a
> single input file can produce PDF, HTML and DocBook (as well as Info).
> 
> Arnold

I'd like to mention mandoc. It takes mdoc or man pages and produces
output in various formats. See e.g. http://man.openbsd.org/mandoc. The
formatting and links are derived from the semantic info in the source
pages.x

	-Otto