man pages

[Dick Dunn]

larry at nstar.uucp (Larry Snyder) writes:

> Interactive has on-line manuals as well - but they use a non-standard format
> for them (at least none of the other software packages get their man pages
> installed correctly)...

Hey, it's not "non-standard" - it's just a different standard!  (that's as
in "The nice thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.":-)
Actually, there's a reason for the change, and it's not just Interactive's
doing.

>...I've had to manually pipe the man pages for cnews,
> smail3, nn, elm and other packages through nroff using "nroff -man < in > out".

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.

> Is that the same for SCO?

Yes.
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd at ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd       Boulder, CO   (303)449-2870
   ...but Meatball doesn't work that way!