[plug] Writing 'man' pages

[James Devenish]

In message <200312081541.43476.derekfountain at yahoo.co.uk>
on Mon, Dec 08, 2003 at 03:41:43PM +0800, Derek Fountain wrote:
> Is there a simple way to create 'man' pages these days? I mean without having 
> to learn tex or docbook or some other horribly complicated page formatting 
> program? I've never needed to write one before and don't know the 'native' 
> format. I was kind of hoping for a nice utility to reformat a simple bit of 
> text. I found pod2man - is there anything else?

Don't know about Linux, but under some OSes, the mandoc roff macros are
very well described and you'd probably not encounter too much trouble
doing up something quickly (I'm used to writing man pages, so I am
biased toward thinking it's straightforward). Even if you needed quick
examples to get going, most people's hard drives are full of 'example'
man pages! Not sure what the problem is with DocBook either (Solaris
uses this for its man pages -- plenty of examples on the hard drive).
You could write you docs with GNU info and thenBZZZZZT GAAH!

PS. Doing `apt-cache search 2man` reveals 'txt2man'.