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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!netnews.upenn.edu!news.cc.swarthmore.edu!psuvax1!news.ecn.bgu.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!gatech!udel!news.sprintlink.net!sun.cais.com!cais2.cais.com!toms From: toms@cais2.cais.com (Tom Strickland Jr) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Man Pages Date: 2 Aug 1994 07:29:17 GMT Organization: Capital Area Internet Service Lines: 76 Message-ID: <31kskf$rv6@sun.cais.com> References: <31cnj3$6cl@crl2.crl.com> <31fg3i$of7@sun.cais.com> <31hk2v$fs8@crl.crl.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 199.0.216.200 X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Gordon Furbush (gfurbush@crl.com) wrote: : Tom Strickland Jr (toms@cais.cais.com) wrote: : : 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" : I understand your point of view. But man pages, in hardcopy form, are : often bundled with documentation written using other tools (most commonly : FrameMaker). By authoring man pages using -man macros, you lose the : ability to automatically cross reference the rest of the document with the : man pages, and you can't create a cohesive table of contents or index. Well, gee, seems I have been doing this all wrong for the last 6 years then. I work for a company that produces directories for clients, ussually with 14 indecies more or less depending on the publication, Table of contents, and now hold on, Graphics, tables, etc. All with troff type programs. We do this from begining to end without a single hand touching anything up it is all automated. We have tried FrameMaker, Ventura, Pagemaker, WordPerfect,a nd many type setting programs, but seems troff (et al.) work quite well. So a man page is easy going (al though I must admit I havent written one in quite sometime.) As for mif, I could quote mif to you at one time, we tried to produce a book with this, thinking we could move off on unix to the popular dos/windows world, but we had the program crash several times (so many we had a deleing party at the end of the project to kill frame) Oh and then there was the wonderfull compressed graphic (when importing it went dow to 1 inche square). Oh then if by some chance some one happens to put an apostrophy in your text ' forget getting a coherent line out of mif.. (Another suprise and hours of writing filters). Oh did I mention that it took threedays to format and print an 1200 page book using frame? The book with a few mods (we did a mid years update) took about 3 hours to format and 3 hours to print using troff type tools. Now I should not pick on frame, I had similar problems with other formating software, and in fairness they were running under dos/wndows, but I just plain dont consider it production ready yet. All of this is just my opinion, so I guess there really are people using the programs for large projects, but I find most are doing 1-2 pages, or a big 5 pager, but throw 1200-1500 pages 2 column, with graphics at one of them and watch em crash. Oh I wonder if venture ever got ride of its 250 chapter (or what ever it was) limit? Sorry, my opinions run deep and long, it is not that I dont like anything else, I would rREALLY like to have something new, but gee it has to work! : I know there's an nroff-to-mif filter that converts man pages into : FrameMaker format, but it has more than a few bugs and doesn't handle tables. : I was hoping that, after all of these years, someone would have figured : out a better way to author man pages. With all that said I would say I have to agree, there should be a better way, but just seems like we are going to have to test for n/troff usage inthe document format. Let me know if you find the better way, I throw 1200 pages at it and see if it breaks... : Gordon Furbush gfurbush@crl.com -- <TOM> toms@cais.com Computer advice is free. As long as it doesn't cost anything.