-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Thursday 2008-02-07 at 11:05 -0500, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote: ...
Maybe someone will pick it up and run with the program, since it doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore.
Yes, it is mantained - see changelog:
Oh, oops. I'm happy I'm wrong there, then.
Good luck with it, please let us know how it goes.
Here I go. I'm writing this notes as I go, but I'll post when I finish. 1) It is designed for an older set of libraries. Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to load module "libgnomebreakpad.so": libgnomebreakpad.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory But it does exist, in "/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libgnomebreakpad.so". I guess it is looking for an older version. 2) It does not support UTF8 It displays latin1, and when I type an accented letter it displays two strange letters - so no utf. I had to start an xterm in latin1: LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1 LC_ALL=en_US.ISO-8859-1 /usr/bin/xterm -bd blue & and from there I fire up manedit. This could be the worst problem of all, because there is no way to edit in utf8 with manedit. Do you know if current man pages are supposed to be UTF or latin1? [see later] 3) It is an XML editor, which it translates to troff when saving; and it is not WYSIWYG - but that is what you said in your write up. I'd like it to have a toggle to show the formatted output, but no. 4) It warns that if I enable syntax highlighting, it may crash. So far it hasn't, but who knows... 5) I can not even change the font size: the letters get substituted by squares, or I loose accents. I had to delete the configuration file to restore working defaults. It must be a byproduct of not supporting utf. [...] I haven't finished yet, but I found a blocker. The program does it job fairly well, but the locale encoding turns out to be a problem. I asked the people of the project for whom I'm translating their pages, whether they wanted the pages in latin1 or utf8, and the answer is "neither": ] Characters outside the ASCII printable range must be encoded; see ] groff_char(7) (but note that we use "\('e" rather than "\['e]"). This is a problem too with manual pages in the suse distro: they either display well in latin 1 or in utf 8, but not both. And using the encoding described in groff_char(7) they display correctly in both. The blocker is that manedit does not support that encoding. I would have to write "ol\('e" instead of "olé", which may be just a nuisance for a coder, but it is a big inconvenience for a writer: I can not spell check the file, and my sight doesn't see "olé" but gibberish, so I can't proofread the text. :-/ I don't understand how nobody has created a good program for writing documentation "man" files by mere mortals, not by coders. And I do understand now why some projects refuse altogether to create a man page and make do instead with html or pdf files, or why man page translations are so obsolete as to be useless, when they do exist. I have also discarded (and some tried) gmanedit, gconglomerate, gjots2, pandoc, zoem... I don't know what I will do. :-/ - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4-svn0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFHra1JtTMYHG2NR9URArlYAJ9obTm3271FNfLrrU+g9b5vOMRLmwCgjp7c 5P3YnzLo4T4MDE0cJ3H3DxM= =SNzp -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----