Splitting the man page (was: Re: [MEncoder-users] aac encoding with lavc)

[Ivo]

On Thursday 28 September 2006 19:19, Nicolas George wrote:
> Le septidi 7 vendémiaire, an CCXV, Rich Felker a écrit :
> > This has come up many times before and I'm STRONGLY against splitting
> > the man page. Having it all in one file makes it trivial to find
> > anything you want with the / key. Multiple files means you have to go
> > back and forth between multiple man commands. The only people who
> > benefit from splitting it are people too stupid to learn to use their
> > pager...
[..]
> About huge man pages, I would suggest to take a look at one that beats
> mplayer's on a 3-to-1 basis: zsh. There is a thematic split (builtins,
> expansion, modules, etc.), and a zshall man page that includes them all,
> to allow global searching. I can tell it is really practical.

Perhaps one could setup something like:

parts="lavc.1 audio.1 video.1"
for i in $parts ; do cat header.1 $i footer.1 > mplayer-$i ; done
cat header.1 $parts footer.1 > mplayer.1

The last command should generate an exact copy of the current mplayer manual 
page.

You could also go the other way around. Leave current mplayer.1 as it is, 
add some comment lines that can be used to strip out certain sections which 
then can be glued to together automatically to form mplayer-lavc.1 et 
cetera.

--Ivo