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:
“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
“The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. If he loves, it is not to give himself, to blend in fecund union with another being, but to meditate on his love. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)
“Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff of any degree of fineness; but nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat- flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)