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dv3500ea
Asked: 2010-11-24 11:57:12 +0800 CST

Are there any GUI man page editors are available?

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I find the man page format extremely painful to write. Is there a GUI (WYSIWYG or WYSIWYM) editor available to make this task easier? I'm hoping for an application that is to man pages as Kompozer is to web pages.

I have tried gmanedit but have found that it is basically just a text editor with some easily available snippets - it is necessary to know the man page format to use it and the editing area is just a text widget.

While I'd prefer software that is in the official Ubuntu repositories, I am OK with using unsupported methods for installation such as PPAs or installing from source.

gui software-recommendation editor documentation

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It is possible to author man pages using DocBook markup and use tools such as docbook2x-man to create troff output. There are some visual ("WYSIWYM"-style) editors available for editing DocBook markup. For example, the GPL-licensed Syntext Serna Free:

    Screenshot of using Syntext Serna Free to edit a DocBook reference entry

    Also, doclifter is a utility for converting man pages to DocBook.

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  2. This is an addendum to Jukka's suggestion of using docbook with the main reason why I like it other than it's much easier to write and deal with:

    You can convert it to .pot files for more easy translation. For example, creating a .pot (language template):

    xml2po -o my_program.1.pot my_program.1.xml

    Then merging translated files (.po) back into a language specific docbook man page, in this case German:

    xml2po -p de.po my_program.xml > my_program.de.xml

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  3. Grapse, an HTML5 webapp, was featured on Hacker News 2/3 of a year ago. It includes built-in preview and syntax highlighting.

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  4. There is one, ManEdit. However, I don't know if its still active :(

    Thanks!

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