man pages

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In article <1990Oct30.202322.8350 at ico.isc.com> rcd at ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) writes:
>larry at nstar.uucp (Larry Snyder) writes:
> ...
>
>The current (Sys Vish) distribution style for man pages has them pre-
>formatted for a relatively generic device (fixed pitch, boldface by over-
>striking, etc.) and packed (.z format).  While this may seem unfortunate
>in that you can't reformat and print them on whatever random printer is
>sitting in the hallway, it became necessary when DWB was unbundled: the
>old manual-page format was n/troff input, hence you needed at least nroff
>and the -man macros.
>

It would be nice if they could supply nroff with the standard system and
put the troff stuff in the DWB. Otherwise, they should ship the proper
manual sources with DWB. One of the strengths of early UNIX was that the
doco. could be maintained. We have lost this, but there seems to be no
reason why we couldn't have it back. These days, nroff isn't much use for
anything other than the online manual (and perhaps as a cheap demo. for
DWB). Put nroff in the base system and sell more DWB!


	 	b++