Hi Anathea, Anathae Townsend wrote on Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 01:49:31AM -0700:
> From the looks of the /usr/share/man directory, there are provisions > in OpenBSD for postscript versions of the various manual pages for > OpenBSD. > > I have looked, but not exhaustively, in the make files under > /usr/src/share/man to see if there was any simple way to automatically > generate the required .ps files. I was unable to understand enough > to find such, but I did find that I could generate individual files > by using 'nroff -Tps -mandoc example.0 > ~/example.ps". Jason answered that part of your question, pointing you to the MANPS make variable. > Is there any perceived use for a non default target in the > /usr/src/share/man make file that would be able to generate a document > that would include all the man pages in it? That can't be done in /usr/src/share/man/Makefile because only a small part of the manual pages live below /usr/src/share/man, most are scattered all over the tree, accompagnying the source they are documenting. That's why it's part of the make build framework. > Suitably formatted of course, blank pages for man pages with an odd > number of pages, maybe even table of contents, index, and section > header pages. That's probably much more work than you think, because you would hardly want this kind of book printed out in alphabetical order. Sure, you would want an alphabetical index. But what would be sorely lacking is a structured table of contents. For the online manual, it's not that bad, because apropos(1) allows you to work around the lack of a table of contents. But you can't do a full text search in a printed book, short of reading the whole book. I bet you would soon find yourself chasing SEE ALSO entries, and i bet without apropos(1) to help you find reasonable starting points, you wouldn't enjoy the chase. Setting up a structured table of contents is an awful lot of work. There are literally thousands of manual pages (nearly 7500 including the symlinks). I have started working on the task and am now about 25% through, but even these 25% are far from pretty right now. Thus, after the first pass proving the concept, a second pass will be needed to clean up the details. And then, the thing will need constant maintenance. You know, some of the developers have developed the bad habit of implementing new features now and then. Thus, in order to keep the maintenance effort manageable, a third pass implementing some kind of partial automation will probably be required. Thus, do not expect to get a usable printed book in 2009. Yours, Ingo
