Re: Modernising UNIX manpages.

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> I would like to investigate the possibility of using Markdown as an
>> alternate format for UNIX man-pages.
> 
> You picked the worst possible markup imaginable. Not just for man
> pages, but for any technical documentation, *period*.  If you're
> interested in "modernising", I suggest rewriting man pages to use
> mdoc(7).
> 
> Markdown has one feature: readability. That's literally it.

Mhmm, what `pandoc` provides is quite nice, and I have successfully
used it to produce technical manuals in various formats.  For example,

  https://repo.or.cz/ttfautohint.git/blob/HEAD:/doc/ttfautohint-1.pandoc
    (main source code file)
  https://www.freetype.org/ttfautohint/doc/ttfautohint.html
    (website)
  https://we.tl/t-uVkRxzMlva
    (PDF and txt; the link is valid for a week, otherwise to be found
    in the program's tar bundle)

are documentation files for my `ttfautohint` program, from the same
source file, without any post-processing of pandoc's output.

The basic question is, however, whether Markdown is sufficient for
*man pages*.


    Werner