Writing Man Pages
On 4.4BSD and its descendants, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, and OS X, and in GNU/Linux systems, two groff macro packages are available for use in writing manual pages, man and mdoc. The man macro package is older and is the traditional macro package used to write manual pages on UNIX systems, whereas the mdoc package is newer and offers more support for semantic structuring of documents. The commands man groff_man and man groff_mdoc may be used in 4.4BSD-descended systems, and in GNU/Linux, to bring up the online documentation (man pages) for using the man and mdoc macro packages, respectively.
In addition, one can simply inspect the source code for man pages installed on the system to see how they are written, typically found in /usr/share/man and other directories on 4.4BSD-descended systems and GNU/Linux systems. (To find the location of the manual page source file for command command, type man -w command.)
Man pages can also be written in DocBook or LinuxDoc format, then converted to groff.
Read more about this topic: Man Page
Famous quotes containing the words writing, man and/or pages:
“I thank you for your letter. I was very glad to get it; and I am glad again to write to you. However slow the steamer, no time intervenes between the writing and the reading of thoughts, but they come freshly to the most distant port.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self- Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)