filePro UNIX Manual Page I Wrote

[Fairlight]

You'll never BELIEVE what Joe Chasan said here...:
> 
> failing that, if bob or someone else has the time and interest to concoct 
> a shell script to read the makemenu.hlp and build man pages from it i'm
> sure we'd all benefit as we can recreate with each release.

I could have spared the time.  I did in fact look at differing .hlp files
on differing versions tonight.

I've come to the conclusion that the only things that are actually standard
in the file format are the @@@ lines, the \r reverse video indicators, and
comments.

The rest...I looked at makemenu.hlp and dcabe.hlp.  The formatting of the
actual contents of the sections is pretty much arbitrary, with variable
amounts of whitespace that can't be depended on to give you a really
sensible .hlp -> manpage converter.  You could convert whole sections, but
making them look even halfway meaningful would require something more akin
to an AI program than a simple parser.  Even with liberal use of powerful
regexps, there are too many variations and exceptions to get it right in
any reasonable amount of time.

I think I can safely say I'll save myself the headache and take a pass on
this one.  I'd have liked to help, really.  Sounded fun until I saw just
how well-structured the section contents aren't.  :(

If I thought anyone cared, I'd suggest writing the next docs using XML.  
I somehow doubt that's a huge priority though.

Luck and Tylenol to anyone giving the requested converter a shot.

mark->
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