Re: man pages

Michael Smith writes:
 > Now I wish I had suggested using DocBook earlier :(
 > 

Actually, I have been lurking on the docbook-apps list :-> and I've
followed the work you put into the DocBook to man stylesheets (haven't
tried them yet, though). I was aware of the possibility, but in order
to close a hole in no time the groff approach seemed easier to me,
especially as most tools are fairly static and the startup options
won't change every other week.

But then you wrote...

 > Anyway, should you decide using DocBook would be worthwhile, there
 > is a tool called "doclifter" that can convert troff/groff man
 > pages to DocBook -
 > 
 >   http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/
 > 
 > It's packaged for Debian and maybe for some other distros (anyway,
 > it's just a shell script) and does a very good job on most pages.
 > 

... which is almost like eating your cake and still have it. As the
markup in the current man pages is pretty simple, I guess doclifter
will have no hard time to "lift" them. This would make the move to
Docbook fairly easy.

The real question though, and I've been wondering since I know
DocBook, is whether I can maintain my RefDB manual (a 300+ page
DocBook document shipped as HTML and PDF) and the man pages from the
same sources. The manual contains similar descriptions of the tools,
with synopses of the commands and such. Is that possible?

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
[email protected]
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de



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