man vs info vs texinfo files

[Bill Crawford]

On Friday 06 March 2009 08:26:07 Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams wrote:

> Are we then going to require people to use elinks or w3m to view them,
> plus expect them to know where the HTML pages are stored in the first
> place?
>
> No, the far more sane option is to fix info or pinfo so that it catches
> SIGWINCH and reflows as necessary.

They can't, because the info format is PREformatted for that size. It doesn't 
contain enough markup to reflow it without breaking precious content that's 
been carefully laid out by the author.

The advantage of things like docbook is precisely that they can be reflowed 
without breaking things (well, not so easily anyway).

Now, we could provide automatic translation to "man" format; or we just 
make "man" able to shell out to a viewer that can handle docbook, or run a 
translator to produce HTML on the fly, or ...

Sun converted to SGML format for man pages (I believe it was a tweaked version 
of DocBook) many years ago, it's possible, and it would be very nice indeed to 
do this.