Re: troff converter ?

[Dumas Patrice]

> texi2roff has not been worked on in many years.
> 
>     I can't have something formatted like
>     a man page.
> 
> texi2roff will never be able to generate a man page even if it was
> completely up to date, because Texinfo manuals aren't written like man
> pages, as I'm sure you know.  Please see the Output Formats node in the
> Texinfo manual for what I've written about this.
> http://www.gnu.org/manual/texinfo/html_node/Output-Formats.html

Of course I know that and I don't want the man page structure but the man
page formatting, that is underline and bold, for example, on a console.

> There are three realistic choices for making man pages to my knowledge:
> 
> 1) write and maintain it separately.

I think this is the best. However it could be nice if it was possible to 
write them separately, but in texinfo. Something like
@heading{NAME}
man -- format and display the on-line manual address@hidden
manpath --  determine user's search path for man pages
@heading{SYNOPSIS}
man [-acdfFhkKtwW]  [--path]  [-m @var{system}] .....

and so on which, formatted in troff would look like a man page. Not so sure 
it is really usefull...

> 2) use help2man.
> 3) introduce markers in the texinfo source and have a special tool that
> extracts them.  GCC does this.  Maybe someday there will be support in
> Texinfo for it, but I am not enthused about it, since ultimately the
> same text does not work well in both contexts.

I agree with you that it is better to have separate man pages, what I
want is man page like low level formatting instead of what I get:

ESC[1mDistributionESC[0m

I think that instead of ESC[1mDistributionESC[0m There should be something
like Distribution underlined in bold or the like.

Pat