Re: Generating man pages from other sources

[Guido Draheim <guidod-2003- at gmx dot de>]

Dalibor Topic schrieb:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to have automake generate man pages from a
> texinfo file (or DocBook, or some other format) using
> a suitable tool. How could that be achieved?

I don't know what that question is asking for
actually - suffix rules are written just like
in plain make, nothing special for automake
(appart from registering the suffix but that's
 documented in `pinfo automake`).

If you are unsure as to what master format would
be used, there are a set of options. For example,
look at the gnu server for help2man which is a
perl script that turns the `program --help`
screen into a man.1 page, this is quite common
with debian packages as their policy requires a
man page for each program.

Personally, I prefer a docbook reference page
(i.e. "<!doctype reference") and the xml
stylesheets from docbook org along with
"xmlto" that builds on top of libxml/xsltproc.
That tool can be fetched from redhat servers
and  works fine with other distros as well.

The usage of "xmlto" hides much of the
complexity, just write a docbook reference
page and type
   xmlto man manpages.dbk

When it comes to API documentation (man 3 type)
then you could use any source extractor tool
that can generate reference-type docbook format
from source code comments. However, I'm generally
using just a few perl lines shipped along with
some of my projects to do it, it's not hard to
write such a thing (see http://zziplib.sf.net).

-- have fun, guido  http://freespace.sf.net/guidod