how conv. progman into ascii format

[Darrell McCauley]

followups to grassp-list, please

Peter Sincak (sincak at ccsun.tuke.cs) writes on 5 Feb 93:
>Hello ,
>Can anybody give me an idea how to convert a progman.ps or
>progman.troff info ascii format ???? we would like to have 
>a small tool for making easy searching for procedures in 
>grass-like libs .
>Any comments would be nice

I, too, find this format less than optimal. The final output
is nice, but I would find it much more useful if each
function had a man page.  It's much more convenient to type
'man fprintf' than it is to find a C book. Likewise, it
would be much easier to type 'g.manual R_open_driver' than
it would be to run through progman.ps with a postscript
previewer or track down the printed version.  

The most useful features of the manual are the indices, but
if the man pages were written correctly, a whatis database
could replace this.  

Easier access to information might even speed up grass 
development. I know it would for me.

It might also make the manual easier to update.
If a full printed manual is desired, a few [nt]roff
tricks could easily pull individual files together.

Some of the general discussion (e.g., sample program
accessing a vector file) belongs in the current form,
but information about each function should be kept
separately as well. 

While I'm discussing manual pages, it sure would be nice to
have dig_att.5, dig.5, cell.5, etc, describing the many
file formats.

Shouldn't take anyone familiar with [nt]roff more than a 
week to put this together. You would become famous ;-)
Maybe some week when I'm bored, I'll do this, but 
for now, the current format doesn't bother me *that* much.

>Peter Sincak
>Technical Univerzity of Kosice
>Slovakia

--Darrell 
James Darrell McCauley                Dept of Ag Engineering, Purdue Univ
internet: mccauley at ecn.purdue.edu     West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-1146, USA
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