Questions[documentation](ubuntu)

I've been using Asciidoc ever since I discovered it and use it a lot to be my defacto README text file. It's readable in text and it can output all kinds of other formats, like man pages, pdf, html, etc.

Lately I've been seeing more and more FLOSS projects using markdown. It's slick as far as I can tell, but it still feels far more limited then Asciidoc. Even github seems to support .md better then asciidoc. Am I missing something? Is there a reason so many people are using .md?

I would think the portability of asciidoc and one text file to bind them all makes it much more powerful.

If anyone has any insights, or can tell my why markdown (MD) is so amazing, I'll buy you a virtual beer.

I like to create a rather small Ubuntu installation in a Virtual Box machine. It should basically just provide TeX Live and related tools. I figured now that I have almost 1GB of data under /usr/share/doc. I don't need this documentation in this case, just the LaTeX related man pages, which are not located there.

Is there a way to uninstall all these documentation files using apt-get?
Alternatively, is it reasonably save to just delete the content of /usr/share/doc?
I like to share the Virtual Box machine with others, which shouldn't run in trouble.

I recently learned that there is a huge pile of documentation in /usr/share/doc.

It seems like much of it is gzipped so that it is not directly accessible without administrative privileges:

$ gunzip examples/letter.tex.gz 
gzip: examples/letter.tex: Permission denied

While one solution to this would be for every user to duplicate each item in their home directory just to read it, this arrangement hardly seems conducive to regular browsing.

How do normal people read this documentation?

I am not inclined to believe that the typical user is expected to install and maintain a web server just to read local text documentation.

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.

Regarding man-pages and info help documentation:

Why do two such similar sources of documentation exist?
Sometimes a man-page is available and the info is not; or vice-versa.
I haven't yet latched on to the rhyme and reason behind it.

Maybe there is a significant difference between them, but even if there is, why do they both exist? It seems like unnecessary doubling up.