Re: Man pages format

["David Martin" <dmartina excite com>]

In the groff_man manual page it says:

.TH title section [extra1] [extra2] [extra3]

which displays as:
------------------------------------------------------
title(section)         extra3           title(section)


extra2                 extra1                   page #
------------------------------------------------------

I've found no conditions for the extra fields, so I took
some examples from different popular packages:

.TH A2P 1 "perl v5.6.0" "1999-07-20" "Perl Programmers Reference Guide"
.TH ar 1 "1999" "Cygnus Solutions" "GNU Development Tools"
.TH CAT "1" "August 1999" "GNU textutils 2.0" FSF
.TH CHOWN "1" "January 2000" "GNU fileutils 4.0p" FSF
.TH DUMPKEYS 1 "09 Oct 1997" "Console tools" "Linux User's Manual"
.TH EQN 1 "30 April 2000" "Groff Version 1.16.1"
.TH GIMP 1 "23 June 2000" "Version 1.1.25" "GIMP Manual Pages"

So:
Field #1: Program name (uppercase) ---> MC
Field #2: Section. Has always been 1 for mc ----> 1
Field #3: Date. Different formats. I like the one used by GNU.
Eduardo told me to use an ISO format, but little pages use it.
--------> January 2003
Field #4: Random. Package and version ----> MC Version 4.6.0
Field #5: Most time it's not used. It's like the book title or
company name. I proposed "GNU Midnight Commander". Would anyone
vote for "FSF" or "GNU Manual Pages" ?

If you want more examples you can grep (bzgrep) your man directories.

That makes:
.TH MC 1 "January 2003" "MC Version 4.6.0" "GNU Midnight Commander"

In short (tomorrow?) I will set all help sources in CVS so that
translators may suit them to their languages.

*8-) David

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