[TUHS] Another "craft" discussion topic - mindless tool proliferation

[bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah)]

I used *roff for man pages. Used to use man pages as brief
functional specs for new commands. Worked very well.  Even
prior to 1985 I usually just kept plain text documents in a
readable format (not unlike "markdown". Though, rather than
# section, ## subsect I used separate ==== and --- lines).
Most of my notes start out in that form and longer ones may
get converted to latex files. But it's nice to have choices! 

BTW, Bitkeeper document looks pretty decent.

> On Sep 19, 2017, at 7:47 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> Yeah, markdown didn't exist at the time I did webroff and I like, still
> like, roff.  It says what you want more than how you want to do it.
> 
> On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 07:34:00PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
>> These days I use the markdown format more and more as it is easier and
>> more readable than troff/LaTeX and good enough for this sort of documentation.
>> There is even LaTeX package for it! 
>> 
>>> On Sep 19, 2017, at 7:01 PM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> So there are links in that that don't work, that user guide is really old,
>>> but you should be able to get the idea.  If people bitch about the links
>>> that don't work I'll see if I can fix them.
>>> 
>>> The skinning is in the Html file.
>>> 
>>>> Here's an example:
>>>> 
>>>> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bkdocs/UG/
>>>> 
>>>> is the source, you can look at those files, they are nroff -ms source,
>>>> and then look at 
>>>> 
>>>> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bkdocs/UG/tmp
>>>> 
>>>> and you'll see the web version of the docs.  Which is pretty useful.
>>>> You've got all the .NH 1 headers in the table of contents down the
>>>> left side, and when you click one of them it shows you the .NH 2,
>>>> .NH 3 etc headers for just that section.
>>>> 
>>>> And if you go to
>>>> 
>>>> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bkdocs/UG/tmp/map.html
>>>> 
>>>> you can get html versions of any .NH 1 section, or the entire thing as one
>>>> page.
>>>> 
>>>> It's a ~1700 line perl program (perl 4ish) and it has some ability to skin
>>>> the content.  Source in http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bkdocs/UG/webroff
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> ---
>>> Larry McVoy                     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 
> 
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm