Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1998 17:27:52 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: "Salvador Eduardo Tropea (SET)" <salvador AT inti DOT gov DOT ar>
cc: Hans-Bernhard Broeker <broeker AT physik DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>,
        djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Man pages (was Re: Ispell and pipes)
In-Reply-To: <m0yyzXd-000S4yC@inti.gov.ar>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.980722171856.12232E-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
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On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Salvador Eduardo Tropea (SET) wrote:

> Now: I say man pages must be in plain text format (I 
> don't say the others must be supresed, just add .txt versions) 
> because you need extra tools to read it.

I don't see any extra tool required: info.exe will display these man 
pages automagically.  Just say "info ispell" and it will be displayed, 
with all the BS characters stripped by info.exe.  You even don't need to 
bother remembering whether Ispell has Info docs or a man page, and 
neither do you need to remember to say "info ispell.1".

> 1) If you say: info files must be in a format readable by *any* DOS 
> editor.
> 2) Then I say: man pages too.

IIRC, that was not what I said back when the issue of Info files format 
was discussed.  What I said was that an Info reader should be able to 
read and display both Unix- and DOS-style Info files, because somebody 
might edit an Info file with a DOS editor which doesn't preserve the text 
file format (most of the DOS/Windows editors don't, they always write 
files with a CR-LF pair at the end of every line).  In such a case, and 
Info reader that doesn't support DOS-style text files will fail to read 
the edited file.

This doesn't apply to a man page, since there's no problem with editing a 
man page, all the programs which display them support both file formats.