Re: [Groff] colorized man pages

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Ingo Schwarze <address@hidden> wrote:
 |Tadziu Hoffmann wrote on Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 01:29:07AM +0200:

 ..
 |> And regarding the
 |> "ready-to-use solution" that has "long been available":
 |> for the most part, the semantic information is simply not
 |> encoded in the manpages.
 |
 |That is true for the Linux manpages project, which still uses the
 |man(7) language for manual pages, and for some other projects, in
 |particular GNU software, as far as that uses manual pages at all.
 |For BSD software, that statement has no longer been true since the
 |switch of almost all manpages to mdoc(7) 25 years ago, and various
 |other projects also use mdoc(7).

That is plain untrue unless all you look at is the .Nm and some
rare other constructs, which is not sufficient for a whole lot of
manuals, if not the majority of them.  And those are mostly completely
meaningless inside of large documents like the manuals of bash
(man), mksh (mdoc) etc.

  ..
 |> Ultimately, they're intended to be read by humans, and if
 |> humans understand them their purpose has been achieved.
 |
 |Very true.  In addition to that, and less importantly, semantic
 |searching is at times useful.  And *if* people want semantic markup
 |(which started this thread), they can have it (of course, as you
 |say, only for those manuals that contain semantic markup in the
 |first place).

No.  If you don't know where the root of something is, you can
only provide a list of occurrences of that something.  That
improves searching, but that is all there is about it.
If you have a book of only 200 pages and you have several dozen
occurrances of a correctly marked .Va, then be lucky that you are
in less(1) and not in a paperback.  In an index list of several
dozen places, your concept misses the single bold entry.

I am still dreaming, and it is possible that you could have a real
handbook of all the installed software of your box, automatically
created and semantically correct, with index and toc.  mandoc
-Thtml /usr/share/doc/man* is a great thing, and it is quite fast,
but it won't give you that result.

--steffen