Re: Manpage generation

[Zack Weinberg]

Coming back to some old mail...

On Sat, Apr 13, 2002 at 11:10:20AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 12:56:17 -0700
> > From: Zack Weinberg <address@hidden>
> > 
> > I don't have any idea what it takes to add output formats to makeinfo,
> > though.
> 
> It depends on how different it is from the supported formats, and how
> strict should the output formatting be.
> 
> Are we talking about generating nroff/troff from Texinfo?  Then it
> might not be hard, since this format generally ignores whitespace and
> indentation (and so doesn't need the kind of meticulous formatting we
> do for Info).  And given that Karl wants to rewrite makeinfo anyway,
> now might just be the right time to add this ;-)

The current script that I have generates Perl's POD format
documentation, which is then processed into troff by pod2man.  The
advantage of doing that was I could leverage pod2man's detailed
knowledge of troff and its idiosyncracies.  POD is pretty simple to
work with, but does have some restrictions on indentation and the
like.

If we're adding manpage-generation features to makeinfo, though, it
makes more sense to generate -man or -mdoc troff directly, so as not
to depend on an external utility.

Is there still interest in getting this done?

zw