-mdoc vs. -man

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2007-10-29 20:44, Tim Kientzle <kientzle at freebsd.org> wrote:
> I've had some requests from people who want to use the libarchive and
> bsdtar manpages on non-BSD systems that don't support -mdoc.
> 
> Any problems if I reworked these manpages to only require -man-old for
> compatibility with these systems?  (Other than the inherent
> tediousness of such a project, that is.)

Yes.  At least from me.  The -mdoc macro set is not only easier to grok
than plain -man, but it produces consistently "prettier" output, with an
emphasis on the semantic mark-up of manpage elements instead of manual,
tedious formatting-related markup.

For example, we don't use \f(CWpath\fR in -mdoc to denote pathnames, so
that they are are printed with a constant-width font; we use ".Pa path".
We don't have to manually track macro arguments and type stuff like:

    .IP "\-\fIdebug\fR[=[\fIon\fR|\fIverbose\fR|\fIoff\fR]]"
    .IX "\-\fIdebug\fR[=[\fIon\fR|\fIverbose\fR|\fIoff\fR]]"

and so on...

Although I understand the pains of people who don't have groff or -mdoc,
I'd be a bit sorry if we switched from -mdoc to -man and started writing
with the "old school" style of \fIitalic\fR and friends :(

- Giorgos