Re: [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 10:22 AM Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

>
> *all* the stuff? Please don't do that literally. The garrulity
> quotient of info pages dwarfs even that of the most excessive
> modern man pages.


😂

But I appplaud the intent to assure man pages are complete.
>
The problem is that too many of the gnu style man pages are just written in
the key of -> "see figure one
<https://www.dourish.com/goodies/see-figure-1.html>" as documents telling
you to go to info (which I find maddening).  [I find it similar to ITS not
accepting a BS as the correction character, but instead picking it up and
then telling you to use DEL -- the designers know what you want, sigh].

I'd like simple man pages that are reasonable references. And then get the
rest of the needed documentation out info and the weird hyper texting stuff
into a paper (so you can read it linearly - the way we were taught as
children).   I loved the simple prose in the papers that usually
accompanied the traditional UNIX programs/tools.  I read them and reread
them as I learned to use the features and concepts provided by the more
complicated tools.  After that, the simple man pages were more than
sufficient to remind me of the specifics I needed  to use some features I
did not use every day.

Clem


One of my complaints with info is that as a format, it leads to documents
that does neither well.  They tend not to be reference documents like man
pages as you point out, but they are moisty often than not, particularly
good explanations either. Sigh...

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