History
The UNIX Programmer's Manual was first published on November 3, 1971. The first actual man pages were written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at the insistence of Doug McIlroy in 1971. The troff macros used for man pages (-mm) were the general-purpose ones written by Ted Dolotta (later to be the first manager of USG and the principal author of the System III manual), with additions for the manuals. At the time, the availability of online documentation through the manual page system was regarded as a great advance. To this day, virtually every Unix command line application comes with its man page, and many Unix users perceive a lack of man pages as a sign of low quality; indeed, some projects, such as Debian, go out of their way to write man pages for programs lacking one.
Few alternatives to man have enjoyed much popularity, with the possible exception of GNU Project's "info" system, an early and simple hypertext system. Also some Unix GUI applications (particularly those built using the GNOME and KDE development environments) now provide end-user documentation in HTML and include embedded HTML viewers such as yelp for reading the help within the application.
Usually the man pages are written in English. Translations into other languages can be also available on the system.
The default format of the man pages is troff, with either the macro package man (appearance oriented) or on some systems mdoc (semantic oriented). This makes it possible to typeset a man page to PostScript, PDF and various other formats for viewing or printing.
Most Unix systems have a package for the man2html command which can be used to enable users to browse their man pages using an html browser (textproc/man2html on FreeBSD or man on some Linux distribution).
In 2010, OpenBSD deprecated troff for formatting manpages in favour of mandoc, a specialised compiler/formatter for manpages with native support for output in PostScript, HTML, XHTML, and the terminal.
Read more about this topic: Man Page
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