[techtalk] How to make man pages?

[Alex Yan]

Hey Stephan,

So man pages are in nroff format, and the system that translates that
format on Linux is groff.  If you want the official documentation, you can
check here:

  http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/groff/groff.html#SEC16

(I just found this off a simple google search).

However, the way I learned how to write that (somewhat crazy) format is
just to look at the kill(1) man page (which is pretty extensive, which is
why I used it as an example), the source of which is located in
/usr/man/man1/kill.1 (man pages are usually stored in /usr/man or
/usr/local/man in the manX/prog-name.X file, where X is the man page
section).  It should be easy to look at the different tags and see how
they translate into the real kill(1) man page.

Hope that helps!  I only learned what I needed to (I prefer TeX or XML for
text-processing), so I didn't get into all the fine intricacies of groff,
but I suspect that's your approach as well.  :)


-Alex Yan
 flare at serv.net

On 6 Jul 2000, Stephan Zaniolo wrote:

> 	I'm working on a program and I would like to create man pages for
> it.  Does anyone know where I could find a document that outlines how to
> create one (or several)?  I'm totally lost. :^(
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Stephan
> 
> 
> 
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