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Is there any decent GUI(Graphical User Interface) WYSIWYG(What You See is What You Get) editor (on any platform) that can be used for authoring/editing manpages? An app that can export to the troff format would also be fine.

Michael Durrant
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HairOfTheDog
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    snort. Man pages / nroff is the diametrical opposite of WYSIWYG. I don't think such an editor is out there. – bmargulies Oct 09 '11 at 23:06
  • you'll get more eyes on your question if you add a tag for unix. Good luck. – shellter Oct 10 '11 at 15:21
  • Do you really want a GUI or just an easy way to make manpages? If the latter, I would recommend [Perl POD](http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html). – jwodder Oct 11 '11 at 16:54
  • The man(7) and mdoc(7) macros are there so you don't have to write raw nroff, or need a wysiwyg editor – MkV Oct 19 '14 at 02:21

3 Answers3

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NroffEdit was originally created for writing RFCs, but since they're, like man pages, in troff format, I guess you could use it for that.

Francois G
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  • NroffEdit just might work. Here's a snippet from a description of one of NroffEdit's features... Converting from Text to Nroff If you don’t have an Nroff version of the document you are about to do edit on, then NroffEdit will create one for you from an existing text version of the document. Paste the existing RFC or Internet-Draft in the left window and select “Convert Text to Nroff” [...] The version in the right window is converted new Nroff, which is identical to the original text version. – HairOfTheDog Oct 11 '11 at 16:55
  • "troff format" links to the linux man-pages(7), which is more about the conventions of linux man pages and the man macros, not really about troff/nroff – MkV Oct 19 '14 at 02:27
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There is an online editor for man pages in mdoc format: http://roperzh.github.io/grapse/

Mdoc is a semantic markup for man pages. It has been around for about two decades and supported by Linux and other Unix-like OSes. You should prefer mdoc to troff.

citrin
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You want ronn.

Ronn builds manuals. It converts simple, human readable textfiles to roff for terminal display, and also to HTML for the web.

It's not WYSIWYG, but it does let you export normal text files. Since nroff doesn't support arbitrarily positioned text that's about as good as it gets.

polm23
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