Re: Proposal for man pages

On 15/08/2013 19:01, al davis wrote:
> On Thursday 15 August 2013, Rishabh Yadav wrote:
>> Ngspice has devhelp command which provides information on all
>> devices but Gnucap lacks these things so I was thinking of
>> writing "man pages" which will provide complete
>> documentation on each command.This will help users alot
>> instead of looking for the command in manual everytime they
>> can directly use man command to get the information of the
>> command.
> Good idea ..
>
> I started it a long time ago with a help_dispatcher and virtual
> function "help(CS&, OMSTREAM&)const" in e_base.h.
>
> That is as far as I got.
>
> The idea is to have a new "help" command that uses the
> help_dispatcher to look up topics.  Then everything can have a
> help() function that prints the needed help.  Eventually it
> could become a standard part of all plugins.
>
> It could use the other dispatchers too, to provide some kind of
> hierarchy and eliminate the need for everything to make an
> explicit entry in help_dispatcher.
>
> The code for the help function could be very simple.  The real
> work is in entering the text everywhere.  Hopefully it could be
> done in such a way as to provide several modes ....
> interactive, texinfo, printed manual, web ... and only require
> the text to be typed in once.
>

Octave documents its functions by a texinfo string in the comments of 
every function and generates pdf and html documentation from this, so 
there might possibly be some useful things to copy from there, 
especially as it uses autotools for the build system, and anything 
useful from this could also be copied.

Richard

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