🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug1.105827.11321@cas.org> lvirden@cas.org (Larry W. Virden) writes:
>Did anyone ever consider writing a man page form type program?  That is,
>the program would use curses, bring up a 'form' asking for title of man
>page, author, usage, etc.  perhaps do some edit checking, generate a
>man page, AND, if the user specifies that name when invoking the form,
>reads in the man page, fills in the fields, and allows the user to edit
>it?

I'm only aware of one  such effort.  The author wrote it in Interlisp
to create Interleaf versions of manpages.  Conceptually, the idea is
sound, of course.  

>This would enable folks uncomfortable with nroff to make corrections
>to man pages (spelling errors, changes in directories, etc.) and also
>be an aid to folks who dont program in -man regularly when they need
>to generate a new man page.  It would also, if smart enough, allow me
>to load in man pages from packages which are not quite right in terms
>of the -man macros and update them...

Perhaps.  I don't think people should be too intimidated to correct 
source manpages with any ASCII editor.  You should be able to make
simple edits without confusion.  As for writing new manpages - there 
are only a handful of man macros anyhow; unless you are going for 
some clever effect, there isn't much difficulty in learning the 
fundamental macros used for creating manpages.

I see the real value of an interactive tool to create manpages as 
a mechanism to ensure uniformity of structure and completeness of
information, instead.  This would be of great value for initial 
creation of manpages by programmers.  The Committee for Common Man 
would like to have such a tool to create manpages that conform 
structurally to the manpage architecture we are defining.  I'd like
to hear of any serious starting points for such a tool.

>-- 
>Larry W. Virden                 UUCP: osu-cis!chemabs!lvirden
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-lar



-- 
Lar Kaufman, Chair, Committee for Common Man  work: 617-890-0444
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