Re: [Groff] Draft paper: "Writing Effective Manual Pages"

[Matthias Czapla]

On Sat, May 08, 2004 at 06:56:57PM +0200, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > In contrast to this I started with the troff tutorial by Kernighan
> > and then the User's Manual by Ossana and Kernighan and have now a
> > quite confident feeling that I know the basics enough and can
> > quickly locate more specific requests.
> 
> Note that you'll miss many useful groff additions if you concentrate
> on those two documents only (for example, the use of brackets to allow
> identifiers longer than two characters).
> 
> > As a side note, maybe I would not be here now if there would not
> > have been the old AT&T documents which are usually very good and
> > much more concise than the GNU manuals.
> 
> What exactly do you mean?
> 
> > Lots of similar ways to do one thing and its not easily obvious
> > which is the standard and important one.
> 
> Please go into details so that I can improve the docs.

I didnt want to complain about the groff docs. I find them excellent
as a reference manual! My point is that the GNU tools have acquired
huge amounts of additional features in regard to the early versions.
While this is of course a Good Thing, it is hard to extract the minimum
basics from the reference manual if Im completely new to a subject. At
least for me...

Actually I only wanted to express the joy I had learning groff after
having had a painful time trying to figure out how to do even the most
simple things in LaTeX. Groff is great :)

Regards
Matthias