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From: msp33327@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Michael S. Pereckas)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Pricing and cost
Message-ID: <1990Dec5.033839.20131@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 5 Dec 90 03:38:39 GMT
References: <983@ecicrl.UUCP> <657@silence.princeton.nj.us> <1990Dec4.130922.6961@bellcore.bellcore.com> <1990Dec4.133655.15047@noao.edu>
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In <1990Dec4.133655.15047@noao.edu> rstevens@noao.edu (Rich Stevens) writes:

>In article <1990Dec4.130922.6961@bellcore.bellcore.com> mo@messy.UUCP (Michael O'Dell) writes:
>>
>>PS - Oh yes, dear friends - having online man pages is FUNDAMENTAL to having
>>a UNIX system.

>Speaking of which, does anyone know the status of troff and man-pages
>for 4.4BSD ?  There was talk (from Kirk McKusick, I think) 11 months
>ago at the DC Usenix BOF that they were trying to figure out how to
>handle the man pages when the non-AT&T 4.4 is finally released.
>As I recall, they were trying to get AT&T to release CAT troff to
>the public domain, or else they were going to reformat all the man
>pages in TeX and use TeX for the man pages.

Then you have to figure out a good way to display them online.

I like GNU Texinfo.  It works fairly well, the price is right, and it
is at least somewhat portable.  (There is a DOS port of stand-alone
texinfo utilities, for example.)

Converting -man stuff to TeX is at least somewhat automatable.
Converting to properly arranged texinfo is probably not.  You could
still use texinfo to display converted man pages in their traditional
appearance, although that misses the point of texinfo.

Frankly, every time I look at documents for troff, I get the feeling
that I am looking at a binary.  This is from  a LaTeX user who doesn't
use troff, so there is some bias, but TeX looks like a marked-up text
file, troff like a mark-up file with a little text scattered about in
it.

--


Michael Pereckas               * InterNet: m-pereckas@uiuc.edu *
just another student...          (CI$: 72311,3246)
Jargon Dept.: Decoupled Architecture---sounds like the aftermath of a tornado


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