Hey guys,

For any of you who create man pages, do you have any tool you'd like to recommend?

Thanks,
Rand

Well, um, "vi mymangage.3.src" for instance, with a little knowledge of how a man page is formatted. This is actually not complex, and you can take an existing man page source as example.

Then, "groff -man -Tascii mymanpage.3.src > mymanpage.3" or similar to generate the final man page.

Eric

I should have known that I would get some low-tech answers from fellow Slackers

I stumbled across some fancy GUI-based tool on the net a couple of months ago but I can't seem to find it now. I just downloaded and compiled ManEdit but I couldn't get the preview feature to work.

In the good ole days I used to build .ps documents by hand in Emacs but I guess I'm just getting too old or lazy or both and starting to like a little automation in certain tasks.

Try ManEdit which also has a nice viewer from the folks who wrote the Endeavour2 filer:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...6.1-i486-1.tgz
Or if 'you roll your own' you can get the sources here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...manedit-0.6.1/

Or, even easier, I have this as a self-compiling ROX-Filer AppDir:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...-0.6.1.tar.bz2
Just unpack anywhere you have priviledges and click to compile. You can still use it easy without ROX-Filer, too. Just cd into the ManEdit directory and run ./AppRun. Actually there are two binaries manedit and manview.

For a less low-tech answer, from a lazy man, try txt2tags, which allows you to create man pages, (X)HTML pages and a few other formats from a simple markup language. I use it for my website, but it does man pages just as easily.

Thanks guys. Gnashley I mentioned in my post prior to yours that I tried ManEdit (built it from sources) but that the preview feature (which must be the manviewpart- actually displaying a man page) doesn't work! I don't know what's broken but when I click help it says to make sure I have read permissions. All the permissions are fine- I can do a "man" on the page from the same terminal window and see the man page.

uselpa I am looking for a wysiwyg tool rather than learning another markup language, but thanks for the suggestion

Thanks,
Rand

I built a manedit package to see why it would not run the viewer... but the viewer works!
I just think the program is a little old and it crashes when you click the wrong buttons, and it does not fully support all possible man page tags.
Apart from that, it is useable enough. http://www.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/manedit/

Eric

AlienBob, I was really surprised that the viewer didn't work- it's an essential part and I'm sure they must have tested it. I actually built it twice to make sure.

I may go back and grab another version of the source and try again. It looked like it would be a nice app if I could only actually use it! But it seems to me that I saw another really nice one somewhere. Now I must find it...

I think I have the mystery solved. I went back and got the binary package (yeah, I know) and installed it just to check. I think it was 0.5.12. The SOB worked fine.

Then I uninstalled that and pulled the source code back down (0.6.1) I compiled it and tested it and it worked. Then I built symlinks in /usr/bin so I didn't have to key the long path, and it broke when I reinitialized it.

I think there are probably some non-standard things going on in the config (I wanted to install it to /opt so I used the --prefix option) and I think what it does is when it initializes for a new user for the first time is to jump to the conclusion that the man command is also in /opt (in the manedit config it builds in the user directory the path is specified as a fullpath). Once I straightened that out, it started working.

Like AlienBob mentioned it is a little rough, so I'm still looking, but I'll keep it until I find something better.

If you have ROX, the AppDir I distribute lets you right-click on the icon to choose view-mode or edit-mode. plus you can just drag man-pages on to it to open them, whether they are compressed or not.
ManEdit uses a non-standard tarball structure and config commands. You can easily gather the info from My PkgBuild script for the regular application:

#!/bin/sh
## Advanced.PkgBuild script for: manedit
## Amigo PkgBuild-0.3 - Gilbert Ashley <amigo@ibiblio.org>
##### ------------Standard Package Variables-------------------
# Most source code only needs these 4 variables set.
# Set SRC_SUFFIX to ".tar.gz" ".tgz" ".tar.bz2" or ".tbz"

BUILD="1"
NAME="manedit"
VERSION="0.6.1"
SRC_SUFFIX=".tar.bz2"

#####--------Common Overrides and Options----------------------
# PRE_FIX=""
# EXTRA_CONFIGS=""
DOCLIST="AUTHORS LICENSE README manedit.CHANGELOG"
# GROUP_NAME=""
#######----------------Processing------------------------------
# Get functions and read in configuration files
source /usr/share/Amigo/PkgBuild/FUNCTIONS ;
# This template calls each process individually so you can add
# extra instructions between processes, or even leave out steps.

pre_process ;
find_source ;
make_dirs ;
unpack_source ;
fix_source_perms ;

# since manedit configures weird we cancel configure_source and manually configure
# configure_source ;
cd $SRC_DIR ;
./configure Linux --prefix=$PRE_FIX

compile_source ;
fake_install ;
fix_pkg_perms ;
strip_bins ;
create_docs ;
compress_man_pages ;
make_description ;
make_doinst ;
make_package ;
post_process ;
exit 0
# end of script

If you want to use the viewer you have to call 'manview'.

That's a good point. I already set up ROX to pop open the manedit GUI when I click on a man page...

If you wanna see a weird, non-standard build that's seriously tweaked, look at Scintilla/Scite. There's no configure- but it allows you to specify an installation path on make, instead. And when you make install, it ignores whatever path you set.

Out, out, damn SciTE!