[Groff] manpages, manpages everywhere

[Larry Kollar]

At work, we make (and I document) various gadgets, some
of which have a command-line interface. The latest one is
supposed to... shall we say, evoke feelings of familiarity in
people who use products from a large manufacturer of
networking equipment. I mentioned that to my boss, who
told me "so does our flagship product, does its manual
look anything like that?"

So I printed out a page of our flagship manual, and a page
of the other manual. They are obviously different, but also
the same in many ways. So I printed out a couple of pages
from our older products, found another competitor's
manual and printed a page of it, then printed the mv manpage
from my work system. I'll bet you already guessed what I
found out....

Except for changes in font, indents, use of rules and tables,
and so on -- minor decorative style changes, really --
there's really not that much difference between any of them.
Structurally, they're identical. I could probably duplicate any
of the styles by applying my patches then fiddling with
man.local. If you look at documents written using the
Information Mapping\[tm] templates, they also bear the same
kind of resemblance to manpages. Not bad for a format that
came out in 1970(?).

Now I'm looking for any case studies on the net, although
Google hasn't been especially friendly this time. It's times
like this I wish I'd pocketed those documentation-related
BSTJ reprints that my co-workers loaned me back in 1984
or so. :-)

--
Larry Kollar        k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: the Revival
http://www.alltel.net/~kollar/utp