Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!jarthur!dhosek
From: dhosek@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Donald Hosek)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Where can I get style sheet for producing a UNIX man page
Keywords: style sheet man page
Message-ID: <871@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Date: 17 Apr 89 00:11:05 GMT
References: <16344@oberon.USC.EDU> <870@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
Reply-To: dhosek@jarthur.UUCP (Donald Hosek)
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA
Lines: 44

In article <870@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> dave@jarthur.UUCP (Dave Stuit) writes:
>In article <16344@oberon.USC.EDU> dwu@girtab.usc.edu (Daniel Wu) writes:
>>I think I remember reading that someone had a LaTeX style sheet that
>>could produce a UNIX man page, but my recollection is a little hazy.
>
>My question for the net:  Why typeset UNIX man pages in TeX?  UNIX man pages
>are formatted in *roff format because (1) nroff is universally available
>(and some variation of troff usually is available on systems with the
>appropriate output devices), and (2) *roff format allows straight ASCII text
>(online man pages) and typeset documents (printed man pages) to be produced
>from the same input file.  The whole UNIX online manual facility is built
>around *roff-formatted pages.

I think the above-mentioned style is available from Clarkson. What it does
is produce printed output (NOT on-line documentation) in a format similar to
that used by man pages.

Now for Dave's question: why format man pages in TeX? Well suppose one
decides to create a set of documentation for one's system (including docs
for things like the Beebe DVI drivers and similar type things). Now since
the bulk of the documentation is in this n/troff stuff (didn't you see
the note which said that it was obsolete? :-)) and you've created man
pages for that, you may decide to use the man page format for all your
documentation, just so that everything is reasonably consistent.

Now, if you were to look into it, the Beebe driver package has some 300-400
pages of documentation in LaTeX format. Converting it would be one heck of
a chore. Changing \documentstyle{article} to \documentstyle{manpage} would
not (BTW that name was purely conjectural. I don't know anything about
the style option myself).

Furthermore, while nroff may be pretty universal on Unix systems, it is
non-existent elsewhere. On the other hand, TeX is available for any 
computer more powerful than a Commodore 64 from IBM PC's to Cray super-
computers. And usually for free or damned close to it. If you run a
multi-system shop (say, Unix and VMS) TeX is a way to allow the documentation
to be run off on any of the systems. 

And if you want to produce on-line docs from TeX (actually a subset of LaTeX)
input, there's the Free Software Foundation's TeXinfo project which does
a creditable job (or so I hear. I miss out on a lot of stuff being a CMS 
junkie).

-dh