man pages

[Panu Matilainen]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Vincent Danen wrote:

> * 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).

*foo* is supposed to produce foo in bold, and it does on my FC5 box. 
However on RHEL 4 it doesn't which is .. well, odd, the asciidoc version 
is the same. Maybe it's some docbook version thingy or something.

 	- Panu -