💾 Archived View for ainent.xyz › gemlog › 2023-07-25-on-writing-documentation.gmi captured on 2024-05-10 at 10:38:37. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-08)
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Call me strange, but I enjoy writing technical documentation.
I'm in the process of adding manpage support to smolver, my Gemini server, and I've found the easiest way to do so is to simply refactor the main project README markdown file in such a way that when handed off to pandoc, the format looks like a typical manpage, no changes needed. This approach will save me from having to maintain separate documentation moving forward, and lets me kill two birds with one stone (both of which are on the project backlog): provide a manpage and cleanup the documentation (it was getting a bit unwieldy to read).
I am certainly glad I found an easy way to generate the manpage, because as it turns out, the markup syntax for the requisite file type, groff, is ugly. Learning it would probably be easy enough, but I don't have the desire right now to memorize it, so I'd have to be constantly looking things up.
Does anyone have groff syntax memorized?