Hi Jeff, Jeff Conrad wrote on Sat, Feb 15, 2020 at 03:45:16PM -0800:
> I neglected to mention that the page is for a very specialized command > and is unlikely to exist in other than PDF format except on my system. > Everyone using it so far is running Windows, so no one is likely to say > "man <program>". Oh. Seeing you ask a question about the formatting of a manual page on a public list concerned with free software, i jumped to the conclusion that you wanted to publish this page as a part of some free software package. Sorry for that. Of course there is nothing wrong with using free software in any way that is convenient for private purposes. > Perhaps man(7) format wasn't the best choice, but it was a quick (and > perhaps dirty) way to provided some documentation that might not > otherwise have been provided. A couple of people mentioned the lack of > bookmarks, which does seem pretty lame for 2020. Perhaps a better > alternative would be to rewrite the page in texinfo to avoid confusion, > though in this context, I'm not sure the effort is justified. And at this point, the man(7) language is better maintained and appears to have more of a future than texinfo, which has been a lame duck now for at least half a decade, probably longer: https://www.mail-archive.com/groff@gnu.org/msg08172.html > Anyway, thanks for the observation, which I might have not thought of > (one person did ask about a Linux port). Using the MKS environment, I > sometimes forget that most *nix environments have diverged considerably > from mine in the last 15 years (the MKS man command doesn't appear to > format anything, expecting formatted files to reside in */cat? directories > as on most Unix systems long ago). Heh. That's one man(1) implementation i have most likely never seen. They even provide a fairly details reference manual online: https://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/man.1.asp And indeed, below FILES, it says: man[0-9]/*.[0-9] unformatted reference pages. Note: Unformated reference pages are not currently supported. Reference pages stored in these directories are treated as pre-formatted pages. But this page lists groff: https://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/cmd_index.asp So the tools are there, and the gap shouldn't be too hard to close for you! ;-) Yours, Ingo
