On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 12:19:21PM +0000, Tuomo Valkonen wrote: > On 2007-03-20, Joerg van den Hoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > so, if the tutorial is called via some keybinding or menu it does'nt matter. > > if the user wants to view it from the command line it's of course inferior > > to > > `man' > > So, no, you can't make an 'ion3tutorial' man page if you use the 'ms' > package, which pretty much takes away the whole point of using the > ancient *roff.
I don't agree with the conclusion (duck and cover...): a) `groff' is not ancient at all and still actively maintained (`groff' is actually more recent than TeX). If you mean the whole concept: old, yes but quite capable of achieving almost the same ps/pdf quality as with TeX. even the really ancient original `troff' which hangs around on commercial Unixes still would work OK for most things. it's _much_ smaller too (one to two orders of magnitude for the size of the distribution, probably...) and faster. the assessment that groff is "the thing which formats manpages" is a rather small fraction of the truth. b) `groff' is simply part of any Linux and xxxBSD distro (without it `man' would'nt work). that's a big difference relative to, say, TeX or some other markup stuff. one can rely on it being present. c) my main point right from the start was, that `groff' is probably the only formatter around which is capable of providing nicely formatted output in the terminal (see `man') including (bold/underlining margin adjustment etc.) in addition to allowing generation of a professional quality pdf version, say. my preference for browsing "finite size" manuals is `less', just like what I do with the manpages. I don't need no heavy intra-document crosslinking (although it were possible with groff -Thtml). the terminal output of `groff' is _much_ more readable than some text dump. d) the difference between using `man' and using `groff -ms' is marginal: `man' is only providing the automatic lookup along MANPATH and the construction of the `groff' call. if the tutorial were written with `ms' instead (which would scale much better to extending the thing in the future) one would have to bind the corresponding key to the correct groff call instead -- so what? requiring to reach a tutorial via `man' in the shell manually -- which I said is the only thing really sacrificed when switching to `-ms' -- I feel is not necessary. e) I think the decision between `groff -man' and `groff -ms' should be more dependent of whether the people contributing would go to the trouble of learning new macros (supposing they are fluent with `-man', which might not really be the case: then `-ms' probably is actually easier) and whether one wants to get more control over formatting layout in a way which would allow to create a real manual, not only a manpage. I think it would'nt harm if one would not loose this option without better reasons than that the tutorial would simply not pop up via `man tutorial'. joerg
