man pages

[Vincent Danen]

* Vincent Danen <vdanen at annvix.org> [2006-06-01 16:33:32 -0600]:

> * Vincent Danen <vdanen at annvix.org> [2006-06-01 16:10:13 -0600]:
> 
> > > Personally, I would go for the asciidoc format, and I'll even take what
> > > you started there and work on it, and the others, as time permits.  I do
> > > have a week and a half off here, and because I'm taking advantage of
> > > apt-rpm for Annvix now, I'd like to contribute something back (and my
> > > stronger suit is documentation, rather than development).
> > > 
> > > So unless someone yells "hell no", I'll start on this.  I'll try to do
> > > as much as I can with a bed-resting wife and four-year old daughter so I
> > > can't promise a quick work, but I'll try to have at least some of this
> > > done and ready to contribute back this weekend.
> > 
> > Good lord... I'm getting about a bajillion xsl-related errors trying to
> > compile this thing with "a2x -f manpage apt-get.txt".  Did you have to
> > do anything special to get this thing running?
> 
> Geez... the problem is apparently too-new versions of libxml, xsltproc,
> etc.  I've managed to make it work on Mandriva 10.2 (sigh).  Anyways,
> more to come.  =)

Well, I'll tell you one thing about asciidoc I don't like already.  For
some reason, I can't seem to make it bold text; it translates stuff
like 'foo' to \fIfoo\fR which is great, but there's nothing to make
things bold (\fBfoo\fR) which is not so good as bold is often used in
manpages (check the source of any man page and you'll see it riddled
with \fB).  

I can "post-process" the manpage using perl to change some specific
markup to do this, but it might not translate so well to other formats
(ie. I'd do stuff like &apt-get& which would turn into \fBapt-get\fR for
the manpage, but you'd have to strip that from the text before passing
it to a2x).

I'm not sure why the implementation is kind of half-assed in this way,
as \fB is used a *lot* in manpages.  I'll keep poking at it, but even
googling isn't seeming to find anything good there (although maybe it's
a stylesheet thing that can be tweaked).

-- 
{FEE30AD4 : 7F6C A60C 06C2 4811 FA1C  A2BC 2EBC 5E32 FEE3 0AD4}
mysql> SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0;
Empty set (0.00sec)
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