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From: hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at (Peter Holzer)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: On-line manuals
Message-ID: <2314@tuvie.UUCP>
Date: 12 Feb 91 11:46:21 GMT
References: <7451@crash.cts.com>
Sender: news@tuvie.UUCP
Lines: 30

cwr@pnet01.cts.com (Will Rose) writes:

>On-line manuals.
> 
>du on the current man directory gives 336K:
[...]
>By the way, if you are writing manuals, *PLEASE* do not use formatters such
>as troff.  They look lovely if you have the cpu cycles to spare, but they
>bring the average XT clone to its knees.  Further, none of the Minix
>formatters (mroff, nroff, roff etc.) are especially compatible, tho' mroff
>looks like a winner.

I think the cpu-cycles are not a problem. If the man directory
is only 336k big you surely have enough space to hold both the
nroff sources and the formatted man-pages online. The man command
can then look for the formatted man-pages and display them
directly. Only if the requested man-page is not present or older
than the source file it needs to call nroff to format it. 

The incompatibility of various *roff's might be a bigger problem,
but as we all use Minix, and Minix comes with nroff as standard
text formatter we should all just use nroff (Just as we all use
13-bit compress to compress files we want to distribute,
although there are programs that can compress better).

--
|    _  | Peter J. Holzer                       | Think of it   |
| |_|_) | Technical University Vienna           | as evolution  |
| | |   | Dept. for Real-Time Systems           | in action!    |
| __/   | hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at                 |     Tony Rand |