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:
“Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The expansive nature of truth comes to our succor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man helps himself by larger generalizations. The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds your stuff to any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends on 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 (1825–1895)