Re: nesting lists in man(7) pages

[Larry Kollar]

Ingo Schwarze <schwarze@usta.de> wrote:
> 
> G. Branden Robinson wrote on Wed, Aug 11, 2021 at 01:16:45AM +1000:
> 
>> but I reckon I should actually step up and try to improve one of the
>> generator tools, like pod2man
> 
> That would be a noble deed because pod2man(1) is a very useful tool
> and produces almost decent man(7) code in most respects, though i
> don't doubt it can be made even better.  Also, helping Russ Allbery
> would feel like giving something back to a venerable greybeard of
> of outstanding merit.
> 
>> or docbook-to-man, before making this claim.
> 
> I pity you if you try, but you would be a hero if you succeeded.

General Docbook to man(7) would be quite an undertaking, yes. But given
some input constraints (i.e. the Docbook document is structured similarly
to a manpage), it should be possible to get decent output. But for best
results, the author would need to consider man(7) while creating and editing
the Docbook source.

I have often (for print fiction) done a Markdown -> HTML -> ms uplift. The
HTML is needed for the eBook side, but I’ve recently begun using Kristaps’s
Lowdown utility to go straight from Markdown to ms.

Manpages, whether man(7) or mdoc, have much to teach tech writers using
XML nowadays. Not the least of which is KISS. Another important lesson is
that most of this stuff has been thought of before — some of it before
computers (let alone formatting software) even existed.

(And it’s a good thing I’ve been working remote for the last 18 months, as
I regularly scream about XSL:FO and CSS3 both lacking any equivalent to .ne,
which has been around for about 50 years! Keep with next/previous helps,
but it just doesn’t quite measure up to having a conditional page break based
on remaining vertical space.)

— Larry