Re: [Groff] RE: Simplifying groff documentation

[Peter Schaffter]

Joining the bunfight...

On Sat, Dec 23, 2006, Ted Harding wrote:
> I'm personally not that interested in "groff for man-pages" as
> such (though I think that it's as good as anything else so it
> might as well be used), in that I would not favour the intrinsic
> functionality of groff being vulnerable to the demands of man-page
> formatting. Let groff develop as a real typesetting engine in its
> own right, for the production of documents of all kinds, and let
> 'man' take what it can from what groff has to offer.
<snip>
> > I think man macros will still have a place as a composition
> > format, even if nobody presents from them any more.

I agree with Ted.  Whether or not groff is used to present manpages
strikes me as nearly irrelevant, provided whatever is used to
present them does so as clearly as groff, whether at the terminal,
as printable PostScript/pdf, or in a browser.  Groff's strength is
as a typesetting engine, IMO, not as a manpage formatter.

The man macros, however, remain one of the simplest ways of adding
logical markup to reference style documentation (somebody once
called manpages "my online `In A Nutshell'").  Since Eric isn't
proposing dispensing with them, I don't see any problem with the
proposal of DocBook XML as the source from which manpages are
actually rendered--provided engines exist to render XML manpages *at
the terminal* as well as groff does.  Eric's Web-centric, fully-
hypertexted documentation is the ideal, methinks, but not at the
cost of losing the ability to type "man <whatever>" at the command
line.

> > (And brace yourselves for the *real* political bunfight, which 
> > is when I try to kill off GNU info...)
> 
> You could have an ally ... !

And quite possibly another. :) Although, ironically, I have to say
I use groff's TeXinfo docs far more than its manpages.  I believe
that's a tribute to Werner and how he's set them up more, though,
rather than an endorsement of TeXinfo itself.

-- 
Peter Schaffter