TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Are UNIX manpages obsolete? From:Stuart Burnfield <slb -at- FS -dot- COM -dot- AU> Date:Tue, 1 Oct 1996 23:26:57 +0800
Sandy Demi said:
> . . .our company has traditionally provided UNIX-style manpages for the
> C and C++ APIs for the product. Now that there are alternative ways
> to provide online documentation (we also provide all our documentation
> online in HTML), we're wondering if UNIX manpages are still necessary.
In my experience, UNIX programmers and administrators like and expect
documentation in man page format, so I wouldn't be cutting out man
pages without first checking with my customers.
I use a nice GUI man page viewer called TkMan. It features hyperlinks
and keyword searching, and suggests how well the man page format could
work within online help.
I suggest you keep your man pages and have links to them from your
online help. This provides the cross-command and task-oriented info,
which is where man pages are usually weak.
Another option is to provide the same information in both formats.
Normally single-sourcing like this is fool's gold, but man pages are
usually pretty chunky and I think you could map the text to online
help format without too much trouble. You should get hold of a command
called rman (RosettaMan) if you're interested in this. It converts
formatted man pages to you-name-it, including HTML.
