Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:12:17 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org> To: Tim Kientzle <kientzle@freebsd.org> Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: -mdoc vs. -man Message-ID: <20071030131216.GB91078@kobe.laptop> In-Reply-To: <4726A890.5090705@freebsd.org> References: <4726A890.5090705@freebsd.org>
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On 2007-10-29 20:44, Tim Kientzle <kientzle@freebsd.org> wrote:
> I've had some requests from people who want to use the libarchive and
> bsdtar manpages on non-BSD systems that don't support -mdoc.
>
> Any problems if I reworked these manpages to only require -man-old for
> compatibility with these systems? (Other than the inherent
> tediousness of such a project, that is.)
Yes. At least from me. The -mdoc macro set is not only easier to grok
than plain -man, but it produces consistently "prettier" output, with an
emphasis on the semantic mark-up of manpage elements instead of manual,
tedious formatting-related markup.
For example, we don't use \f(CWpath\fR in -mdoc to denote pathnames, so
that they are are printed with a constant-width font; we use ".Pa path".
We don't have to manually track macro arguments and type stuff like:
.IP "\-\fIdebug\fR[=[\fIon\fR|\fIverbose\fR|\fIoff\fR]]"
.IX "\-\fIdebug\fR[=[\fIon\fR|\fIverbose\fR|\fIoff\fR]]"
and so on...
Although I understand the pains of people who don't have groff or -mdoc,
I'd be a bit sorry if we switched from -mdoc to -man and started writing
with the "old school" style of \fIitalic\fR and friends :(
- Giorgos
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