Looking for a more pleasant man-page authoring solution
I’ve written man pages before. It’s horrible. Just look at the syntax.
I have to write a new man page from scratch for another product and I’m wondering if there is a less unpleasant way of producing these things.
I know that the Git man pages, for example, are written using AsciiDoc, principally because the markup is easy to write, easy to read, and can produce the desired output formats (man pages and HTML). The downside is that setting up the tool chain to produce those outputs is absolutely horrible, at least on Mac OS X. I don’t want to go down that path again. Been there and done that; it’s horrible (see "Setting up the Git documentation build chain on Mac OS X Leopard").
So I’m wondering if a quick Google search will turn up anything useful. If I can’t find anything by lunchtime I think I’ll just have to grin and bear it and produce the man page the old fashioned way.
Update (10 minutes later): The idea of writing the man page in the Perl Pod format and converting it into a man page using pod2man
is probably a pretty good option.
Update (4 hours later): After playing with pod2man
for a while it looks like it’s definitely the best option for writing simple man pages; the markup is very easy to learn and the output formatting is quite neat.