Re: [groff] groff as the basis for comprehensive documentation?

[Nate Bargmann]

* On 2018 19 Apr 13:13 -0500, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> But the -l option does exactly one thing that is easily described
> in one short sentence that can hardly be misunderstood ("The name
> arguments are interpreted as filenames").

As it has been a few days since I first read mandoc's man(1) page (does
that make sense?), thinking about it, it may be that the first sentence
of -l's description is, "A synonym for mandoc(1) -a."  I honestly don't
recall if I simply stopped reading there and went on to other options or
closed that page and opened mandoc(1) to look at the -a option.

As I have looked at it again, as the primary purpose of -l, as I now
understand it, is found in the second and third sentences, then the
first sentence should be moved after them at the very least or to the
end of the description.

When I look at mandoc(1), the -a option is described as the output being
paginated with more if the output device is stdout.  As I read it, it is
only concerned with output, not file input.

I hope you can see where I got off track.  Perhaps rearranging the
description of man(1)'s -l option will help others in the future.

Anyway,  I'm glad this bit of feedback gave you the inspiration to allow
direct processing of files with a path name.  This is the way Free
Software works best when we build off each other.

> While the main strength of groff(1) is no doubt high-quality
> typesetting, i guess nowadays, more people are using it to read
> manual pages than for typesetting work, and i think that most
> users are not even aware they are using it.

I think this is a very true statement.  It was probably about a year ago
that I really dug in and learned a bit about the role of groff in man
pages.  I had bumped into roff by editing some pages but was occupied
by other things at the time.  That is a bit of a poor track record for
someone using Linux since 1996!

I know that I was led back here by the failed promises of other "one
size fits all" documenting systems.  I now prefer the tried and true.

- Nate

-- 

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."

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