Alright, here are my notes:

Quote:Users talk about the logical components of a document … instead of sizes, fonts, and positions.

And yet to this day, users don’t do that. Not even (most) manpages (on GNU). Instead, we have conventions like “bold text = type exactly as shown”.

Time to look into mandoc.

(Or is it time to abandon all this and write manpages in Markdown?)

Quote:9.1 … The paper takes this general form in ms:

Nice and clean. Easier and faster than LaTeX.

Quote:9.3 The tbl and eqn preprocessors

Alright, this is where the fun starts. Up until this point, everything was pretty basic and simple.

It’s pretty crazy how much “code” is produced even by a simple table. The eqn example is even longer. On the other hand, I have no idea what LaTeX does behind the scenes when you use math stuff. At least with roff, it’s easy to inspect the result.

And the results are good. This is one of my favorite chapters in the book. Always makes me want to use roff for everything. :) (I once used it for e-mails and my phlog.)

Quote:Epilogue

Lol, they complain about feature creep. I wonder what they think about the systems we have today.


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(10-01-2021, 11:49 AM)phillbush Wrote: However, man(7) may be considered deprecated in favor of mdoc(7), which is a semantic markup for manual pages.

People didn’t really notice, it seems. I have a couple of mdoc pages on my system, but the vast majority of files is still “traditional” manpages. As are the manpages of my own projects …

It’s all dying anyway. If anything, projects are using Markdown and then convert it to a manpage using something like pandoc. Or there are no manpages at all. :(