What's wrong with *roff, anyway? (Was: Um... what format are Cygwin manpages?)

[mwoehlke]

(Time to take this to the newlib list...)

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Aug 10 17:25, mwoehlke wrote:
>> Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>> Actually, on some further digging it is, most likely, in sprintf.c
>>> So, no texinfo editing required.
>> Hey! Now I found that /all//by//myself/, thank you! ;-)
>> (See, I told you I'd keep looking.)
>>
>> And... now I understand why the ->nroff converter works so poorly. Eek. 
>> Do you really do the indentation and line length *by hand*, or am I 
>> missing something?
> 
> Hey, you could just sit down and generate a patch which pulls all
> documentation out of the source files, changes it to texinfo format and
> integrates them in a structured way into the newlib/doc subdirectory.
> Then you just have to add the Makefiles changes so that generation and
> installation as man pages, info pages, html pages, tex documentation,
> pdf files...  is possible.  I'm *sure* Jeff would like the idea and
> happily take the patch.

Well, the *real* question was 'will the newlib folks tolerate their doc 
being in a more useful but harder-to-understand format?'. It sounds like 
you're fairly convinced the answer is "yes"... so maybe I'll keep this 
on my list after all.

Although I must be honest and say I'm more familiar with nroff then 
LaTeX; I'm tempted to make an nroff->LaTeX convertor. ;-) But probably I 
will go with SGML because I know there are SGML->nroff/LaTeX converters. 
And yes, if *I* start tinkering I will probably set things up so the 
makefile will generate at minimum info doc and man pages. I'll leave 
PDF, HTML, etc to someone else, but my understanding is that PDF is 
easily generated from either LaTeX or nroff, and HTML is easily 
generated from nroff (*I* don't know about LaTeX, but that doesn't mean 
it can't be done). And of course SGML->HTML is probably easy, too. :-)

Anyway, thanks for the pointers! ...And I hope you're right about Jeff. ;-)

-- 
Matthew
"We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad... You must be, or you wouldn't 
have come here." -- The Cheshire Cat