Re: man Macro Package and pdfmark

[Ingo Schwarze]

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/address@hidden/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