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manpage writer for Docutils

Author: Engelbert Gruber
Contact: docutils-develop@lists.sourceforge.net
Revision: 9059
Date: 2022-05-30
Copyright: This document has been placed in the public domain.

This writer explores the possibilities to generate man-pages from reStructuredText. Man pages are the way for Unix systems to provide help to the user. GNU does this with (TeX)info-pages.

Contents

Module information

Unix man page belong into a numbered section, 1 is user commands, 8 contains administrator commands, the headlines of all manpages are collected into a database, queryable with the program apropos, therefore the headline should contain a short text describing into which group this command belongs.

That information is collected from the title, subtitle and docinfo.

Also man pages have a defined set of sections, that are more or less mandatory, see References.

man pages look like:

man(1)     Man Pager Utils     man(1)

NAME
    man - an interface to the on-line reference manuals

SYNOPSIS
    man [-c|-w|-tZT device] [-adhu7V] [-m system[,...]] [-L locale]

in roff formatting:

.TH man 1 "14 May 2001" "2.3.19" "Manual pager utils"
.SH NAME
man \- an interface to the on-line reference manuals
.SH SYNOPSIS
.\" The general command line
.B man
.RB [\| \-c \||\| \-w \||\| \-tZT
.IR device \|]

This means we have

References

man pages from section 7, man and man-pages.

[LMHT]Linux Man Page Howto.

Conventions

TODO - Open issues