[GTALUG] Man and Info Pages

[Stewart C. Russell]

info was only ever a Gnu thing, and there are as many people who'd do 
the opposite of what the FSF would say on principle. A major strike 
against info is its reliance on texinfo,  its own weird markup language. 
texinfo also has dependencies that run into the gigabytes, since 
installing texinfo will also install TeX Live, the now-vast TeX system 
for Linux.

tbh, I'm surprised that something better than man hasn't come along. But 
you can write manpages in anything (rst, markdown, LibreOffice ...) and 
have them converted to man pages via packages like pandoc — 
https://pandoc.org/ . But when you need PDF output, TeX is lurking in 
there somewhere. I recently spent time debugging why a major embedded 
project never came with a PDF manual, despite their docs being managed 
in Sphinx. It turns out that there's one instance of a Unicode omega / 
Ohm symbol in their entire document base, and their Sphinx PDF rules 
aren't Unicode-aware.

At least its better than Microsoft, whose embedded docs are essentially 
just Bing searches.

cheers,

  Stewart