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Subject:Re: FrameMaker files to UNIX man From:Megan Golding <mgolding -at- secureworks -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:09 May 2002 08:06:08 -0400
On Wed, 2002-05-08 at 08:51, larry -at- kovner -dot- net wrote:
> I have a client that has asked me to convert my FrameMaker 6.0 files to
> UNIX man pages. The goal is to preserve formatting so I don't have to
> spend time reformatting the text files.
>
> Has anyone done this? Is there a utility I should can use?
If you can jump the hurdle of Framemaker file to DocBook markup, you
could try DocBook-to-Man (http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/tools/dtm/).
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Framemaker, so I can't tell you how
to get to DocBook. I do have experience with the DocBook-To-Man utility
and am impressed with the ease of use.
For those who haven't seen them, Unix systems use man pages for short
systems documentation. You call up "man <commandname>" and a nicely
formatted page appears with help on commandname. To write a man page,
some people use a markup language called nroff or troff. Actually, the
terminology I've seen is "nroff macros" (but it sure looks like markup
to me). Anyhow, nroff isn't too bad to work with but is only good for
creating man pages.
DocBook, on the other hand, is a general purpose markup language from
which you can create HTML, text, PDF, and man pages, among others. When
your documentation is bound for many different output formats, DocBook
makes it easy. You can learn more about DocBook at http://www.docbook.org/, where you can read the entire O'Reilly book on
the topic.
Good luck, Larry!
Meg
--
Megan Golding (mgolding -at- secureworks -dot- net)
SecureWorks, Inc.
Make your life a mission - not an intermission.
-- Arnold Glasgow
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