🚀 go-pugleaf

| wcl@oakhill.sps.mot.com (Wayne Long) writes:
| I'm looking for a filter, utility, or editor that
| will take normal, what-you-see-is-what-you get
| text, and convert it into a unix man page with
| minimal hassle.

wayne,

probably the easiest way to make man pages is with a template. at the
end of this message is one that i use.

alternatively, wrapman(1) is a perl(1) script that generates man pages
from perl(1) scripts. it appears in chapter 6 of the camel book, and
source is available via anon ftp in ftp.uu.net:/published/oreilly/\
nutshell/perl/perl.tar.Z. you may be able to get ideas from it.

finally, there's c2man(1), available via anon ftp from keos.helsinki.fi:\
/pub/archives/alt.sources/c2man (and probably other alt.sources archive
sites), which generates man pages from c code.

eric de mund <ead@netcom.com>

| From the keyboard of jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens):
| :My system also has a file /usr/man/man0/xx which contains
| :the skeleton of a man page.
| 
| Here's such a skeleton I once wrote.
| 
| --tom <tchrist@convex.com>
| 
| .TH NAME SECTION 
| .\" NAME should be all caps, SECTION should be 1-8, maybe w/ subsection
| .\" other parms are allowed: see man(7), man(1)
| .SH NAME
| foo, bar \- programs to do something
| .SH SYNOPSIS
| a short usage summary
| .SH "DESCRIPTION"
| long drawn out discussion of the program.  it's a good idea
| to break this up into subsections using the .SS macros, like
| these:
| .SS "A Sample Subection"
| .SS "Yet Another Sample Subection"
| .SH OPTIONS
| Some people make this separate from the description.
| .SH "RETURN VALUE"
| What the program or function returns if successful.
| .SH ERRORS
| Return codes, either exit status or errno settings.
| .SH EXAMPLES
| give some example uses of the program
| .SH ENVIRONMENT
| envariables this program might care about
| .SH FILES
| all files used by the program.  typical usage is like this:
| .br
| .nf
| .\" set tabstop to longest possible filename, plus a wee bit
| .ta \w'/usr/lib/perl/getopts.pl   'u
| \fI/usr/man\fR  default man tree
| \fI/usr/man/man*/*.*\fR unformatted (nroff source) man pages
| .SH "SEE ALSO"
| .\" Always quote multiple words for .SH, just in case
| other man pages to check out, like man(1), man(7), makewhatis(8), catman(8)
| .SH NOTES
| miscellaneous commentary
| .SH CAVEATS
| things to take special care with.  sometimes called WARNINGS.
| .SH DIAGNOSTICS
| all the possible error messages the program can print out, and
| what they mean.
| .SH BUGS
| things that are broken or just don't work quite right.
| .SH RESTRICTIONS
| bugs you don't plan to fix :-)
| .SH AUTHOR
| who wrote it (or AUTHORS if multiple)
| .SH HISTORY
| programs derived from other sources sometimes have this.