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From: ead@ixian.com
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 18:42:44 -0800
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To: Richard Coleman <coleman@math.gatech.edu>
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Subject: Re: Man pages missing
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Richard et al.,

Richard Coleman <coleman@math.gatech.edu>:
] ] Is it me, or has the documentation become a rat's nest, i.e., g/n/troff,
] ] TeX, texinfo and now yodl?  Just what we need, another text formatting
] ] package to learn. :-)  Sorry to sound negative, but when is the progression
] ] of manual preparation going to stick with one package?  If I run across
]
] But yodl is an attempt to bring order to this mess.  We've been
] searching for some time for a set of tools and meta-document format
] that would allow us to generate all the formats necessary, while
] maintaining only one document base.  I researched the problem
] when I was maintainer of zsh, but I couldn't find a solid (and
] free) solution.

I'm not a fan of yodl. Why? Because I've never heard of it before. And
because I have heard of other tools that have proven their utility.

I would think that if you didn't find Texinfo suitable, that POD (Plain
Old Documentation), the documentation format used by the Perl project,
would satisfy. pod2text(1) and Pod::Text(3) come with the Perl5
distribution, and there are pod2man(1), pod2html(1), pod2latex(1), and
pod2fm(1) converters available elsewhere. You can find out more about
POD by:

    * visiting <URL:ftp://uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/lang/perl/CPAN/modules/
      by-module/Pod/PodParser-1.00.readme>

    * viewing the perlpod(1) manual page on a system where Perl5 is
      installed

Be well,
Eric De Mund <ead@ixian.com>
http://www.ixian.com/ixian/ead/

"It's harder to solve people's problems than it is to design really neat
products." --Stewart Alsop