How to create a man page?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2005-06-08 09:53, brian.barto at spectrum-health.org wrote:
> Hi all. I am writing a program with hopes to submit it for inclusion
> to the ports collection. My last step is to include a man page for my
> program. Man pages look to be some sort of markup language. What is
> the standard way to create a man page?

Just typing the text in a plain ASCII file is sufficient.

> Is there some sort of wysiwyg or some other program that makes them
> easy to create?

Not really.  Most of the "rules" for writing a well formatted manpage
are picked up by osmosis; by reading existing manpages and looking at
the diffs committed by more experienced manpage authors.

FYI,

The reference for groff mdoc macros, which are the preferred way of
writing manpages for FreeBSD, is the groff_mdoc(7) manpage.  If you have
the text of the manpage, you can always ask the freebsd-doc people to
review the manpage text and/or formatting.