Re: Documentation

[Nils Barth <nbarth fas harvard edu>]

Thus spake Derek Martin:
> Here's a novel concept for gnome documentation:
> 
> GNOME NEEDS MAN PAGES.

Agreed.
Fortunately, man pages are (theoretically) easy to make for GNOME,
since we document in DocBook. Thus, all you need to do is feed your
documentation through a DocBook -> Man (or TeXinfo, or whatever)
convert and ta-da! Man pages!

You can find many of these at the DocBook tools page:
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/tools/index.html

However, I haven't had any luck with docbook2X or DocBook-to-man
(though I haven't tried very hard) -- I'm guessing that this hurdle is
why there aren't more GNOME man pages.

That said, I agree that we should have man pages and TeXinfo if
possible. If someone has managed to set the above tools (or others) up
to produce man pages from DocBook, could we write it up and put it in
The GNOME Handbook of Writing Software Documentation?
http://www.gnome.org/gdp/handbook.html

-- 
  -nils
(I'm doing the Dr. Genius documentation)