Split manpages; technical question

Split manpages; technical question

[Dominik Vogt]

This is more of a development question.  How do you manage the
split man pages internally?  I guess the split pages and the
monolothic "zshall" page are all generated from the same sources?
Is it one source file that is split into several pages, or several
sources that are combined into a single page?  What tools do you
use for that, are there any pitfalls?

(Background is that we finally want to split the fvwm man page
because it has become too big, but have zero experience with
that.)

Ciao

Dominik ^_^  ^_^

--

Dominik Vogt

Re: Split manpages; technical question

[Peter Stephenson]

> On 15 November 2021 at 11:11 Dominik Vogt <dominik.vogt@gmx.de> wrote:
> This is more of a development question.  How do you manage the
> split man pages internally?  I guess the split pages and the
> monolothic "zshall" page are all generated from the same sources?
> Is it one source file that is split into several pages, or several
> sources that are combined into a single page?  What tools do you
> use for that, are there any pitfalls?
> 
> (Background is that we finally want to split the fvwm man page
> because it has become too big, but have zero experience with
> that.)

It's done from separate Yodl sources, i.e. the inputs are all
split.  The structure is fairly clear from the source distribution,
even if you don't want to know the details of the processing.
So this probably doesn't help you a great deal unless you want
to move to Yodl --- which is a big job and not a very standard
format, although it's served us pretty well.

The zshall page is basically just the separate sources pasted
together, yes.

pws

Re: Split manpages; technical question

[Dominik Vogt]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 11:22:15AM +0000, Peter Stephenson wrote:
> > On 15 November 2021 at 11:11 Dominik Vogt <dominik.vogt@gmx.de> wrote:
> > This is more of a development question.  How do you manage the
> > split man pages internally?  I guess the split pages and the
> > monolothic "zshall" page are all generated from the same sources?
> > Is it one source file that is split into several pages, or several
> > sources that are combined into a single page?  What tools do you
> > use for that, are there any pitfalls?
> >
> > (Background is that we finally want to split the fvwm man page
> > because it has become too big, but have zero experience with
> > that.)
>
> It's done from separate Yodl sources, i.e. the inputs are all
> split.  The structure is fairly clear from the source distribution,
> even if you don't want to know the details of the processing.
> So this probably doesn't help you a great deal unless you want
> to move to Yodl --- which is a big job and not a very standard
> format, although it's served us pretty well.
>
> The zshall page is basically just the separate sources pasted
> together, yes.

Thanks.  We're using asciidoc, which is a bit tricky and less
structured when dealing with nested structures.  It's much easier
than thought.

Ciao

Dominik ^_^  ^_^

--

Dominik Vogt