Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!husc6!cfa!iwm
From: iwm@doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Moor)
Newsgroups: comp.text
Subject: Re: Where can I get style sheet for producing a UNIX man page
Message-ID: <1507@cfa.cfa.harvard.EDU>
Date: 20 Apr 89 21:52:49 GMT
References: <16344@oberon.USC.EDU> <870@jarthur.Claremont.EDU>
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Organization: Department of Computing, Imperial College, London
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In-reply-to: dave@jarthur.Claremont.EDU's message of 16 Apr 89 10:53:19 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.47.2 of Wed Sep 16 1987 on ivax (berkeley-unix)


In article <870@jarthur.Claremont.EDU> dave@jarthur.Claremont.EDU (Dave Stuit) writes:


>   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.

nroff is not portable -- you have to have a Unix system, and troff seems tied 
to certain devices, I know about ditroff, but you have to pay for it. 
There are three TeX to ascii converters that I know of (dvidoc, dvitty and 
crudetype), and of course tr2tex to convert your manual pages to TeX :-)
--
Ian W Moor
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