Re: If it is still unclear to someone...

On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 07:58:58AM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote:
> On 2007-03-19, Joerg van den Hoff <[email protected]> wrote:
> > question: what are the ideas for achieving formatting? should this be written as a troff
> > manpage like the real manpage (might be OK)? or what else? 
> 
> If it is written in troff/*, then definitely as an additional
> 'ion3tutorial' man page. 
I'd say that would be a reasonable solution, also using troff/ms would
not complicate things (it's all the same as with troff/man - just another
macro package better suited for larger documents (section handling etc.)
the `-man'-macros are posing at tighter frame so to speak: it's obviously the
right thing for usual manpages and it's rather obviously not the right thing for
lengthy stuff such as the `bash' manpage. I really believe that `-ms' would be
better suited  for a tutorial/handbook. display would proceed exactly the same:
instead of calling `nroff -man some_file' you'd do `nroff -ms some_file'. so
it's really a question whether the ms-macros are too complicated to use (they
are'nt, maybe easier than '-man').
> 
> One option might be to use markdown, which generates HTML. That's
> what the Ion README, the site, etc. are written in these days. You
> can obviously turn that into a text file with e.g. lynx -dump, and
which  is just that: a text dump. I'd really prefer to have it formatted
with troff. postscript-output (and thus pdf via `ps2pdf') is just there and 
html-output is reasonable, I think.
> maybe into PDF too in some automated way. The sucky thing is the
> extra dependencies, if it's included in the Ion distribution. (I do
would'nt do that.
> not like ReST etc.; markdown seems to be the only one of these ASCII
> markup language with at least a bit of moderation on the amount of
> special syntax.) But maybe having it as a man page would be better...
yes. or an ms-document: e.g., I believe the system V UNIX manuals are written with 
it (or am I wrong?).
> 
> But, no, Mod1+F1 should not be changed from displaying the reference
> man page. F12 -> 'tutorial' should suffice -- and displaying this
not important. but why do you find it necessary to have to equally easy/short ways
to get at the manpage (Mod1+F1 and F1<CR> (I actually use the latter)?
> tutorial and how to get to it in the welcome message.

joerg