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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!udel!news.sprintlink.net!sun.cais.com!cais.cais.com!toms From: toms@cais.cais.com (Tom Strickland Jr) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Man Pages Date: 31 Jul 1994 06:24:50 GMT Organization: Capital Area Internet Service Lines: 37 Message-ID: <31fg3i$of7@sun.cais.com> References: <31cnj3$6cl@crl2.crl.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: cais.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Gordon Furbush (gfurbush@crl.com) wrote: : Does anyone know of a way to create man pages without having to author : them using the -man macros? It seems to me that it might be possible to : generate plain-text output from something a little more modern, like : FrameMake, then place them in a /man?.cat directory. : Has anyone tried doing something like this? Tell you how it is, man pages work quite well, on several different terminals because of the mark up in the text. (It looks right on a VT100 as well as a wyse 50.) They are fairly simple to create, man -k will search to find what you need (it works!). And all this comes with the unix system (unless you have unixware then you have problems). So why would you want to take something that works so simply and so well, and format them with proprietary software like FrameMaker? Btw can you have it search through the pages for you froma simple command line interface? On the other hand unixware says they are going to take an approach similar to waht you have suggested so their man pages will look go on a GUI machine. That is great, but I have people who dail in, not a single GUI user, now what? Are they going to be with out man pages? While on the surface a slick GUI interface seems nice, especially to marketing, I perfer to have something that works well, doesnt require a cray for reasonable response, and I have create my only little (ever so humble) man pages and they work! Sorry, I just am plain tired of having things fixed that are not "broke" -- <TOM> toms@cais.com Computer advice is free. As long as it doesn't cost anything.