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

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

Pete Phillips wrote:
> 3 - I'm really interested in learning more about zsh  - and I've got a
> free evening !
> 
>     man zsh | a2ps
> 
> wait for the dead tree to arrive in the printer tray, stick it in my
> rucksack

man(1) will produce nicely formatted PostScript for you, rather than
printing out a fixed-width version.

    man -t bash | ps2pdf - bash.1.pdf

BTW, does anyone else find the dashes used for options ugly in
bash.1.pdf, e.g. the `-c string' and the `--debugger'.

    $ zcat /usr/share/man/man1/bash.1.gz | grep debugger | sed q
    .B \-\-debugger

I think they should be using plain `-', i.e. as
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/sys/man/1/troff does.

Cheers,


Ralph.