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

On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 12:19:21PM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote:
> On 2007-03-20, Joerg van den Hoff <[email protected]> wrote:
> > so, if the tutorial is called via some keybinding or menu it does'nt matter.
> > if the user wants to view it from the command line it's of course inferior to
> > `man' 
> 
> So, no, you can't make an 'ion3tutorial' man page if you use the 'ms' 
> package, which pretty much takes away the whole point of using the
> ancient *roff.

I don't agree with the conclusion (duck and cover...):

a) `groff' is not ancient at all and still actively maintained (`groff' is
actually more recent than TeX). If you mean the whole concept: old, yes but
quite capable of achieving almost the same ps/pdf quality as with TeX. even the
really ancient original `troff' which hangs around on commercial Unixes still would
work OK for most things. it's _much_ smaller too (one to two orders of
magnitude for the size of the distribution, probably...) and faster.
the assessment that groff is "the thing which formats manpages" is a rather
small fraction of the truth.

b) `groff' is simply part of any Linux and xxxBSD distro (without it `man'
would'nt work). that's a big difference relative to, say, TeX or some other
markup stuff. one can rely on it being present.

c) my main point right from the start was, that `groff' is probably the only
formatter around which is capable of providing nicely formatted output in the
terminal (see `man') including (bold/underlining margin adjustment etc.) in
addition to allowing generation of a professional quality pdf version, say.
my preference for browsing "finite size" manuals is `less', just like what
I do with the manpages. I don't need no heavy intra-document 
crosslinking (although it were possible with groff -Thtml). the terminal output
of `groff' is _much_ more readable than some text dump.

d) the difference between using `man' and using `groff -ms' is marginal:
`man' is only providing the automatic lookup along MANPATH and 
the construction of the `groff' call. if the tutorial were written with `ms'
instead (which would scale much better to extending the thing in the future)
one would have to bind the corresponding key to the correct groff call instead
-- so what?  requiring to reach a tutorial via `man' in the shell manually --
which I said is the only thing really sacrificed when switching to `-ms' -- I
feel is not necessary.

e) I think the decision between `groff -man' and `groff -ms' should be more
dependent of whether the people contributing would go to the trouble of
learning new macros (supposing they are fluent with `-man', which might not
really be the case: then `-ms' probably is actually easier) and whether one
wants to get more control over formatting layout in a way  which would allow
to create a real manual, not only a manpage. I think it would'nt harm if one
would not loose this option without better reasons than that the tutorial
would simply not pop up via `man tutorial'.


joerg