[MPlayer-DOCS] Proposal: split manpages

[Sebastian Krämer]

On Friday 22 October 2004 20:17, D Richard Felker III wrote:

> iirc i was never in favor of it [splitting], but i might not be too opposed 
if
> it's done in a sane way. but i really juet like being able to run "man
> mplayer", hit the slash key, and instantly find any topic i want for
> mplayer or mencoder. breaking up into lots of little man pages makes
> finding the info you want a lot slower!

I agree, doing a 'slash'-search is really the fast way of rtfm-ing.
A point is still that newer users might not really know what they are really 
looking for (or don't know the exact option/word/whatever). Scrolling down 
many many pages becomes annoying then.

An idea that came to me was:
a) show the raw structure of the manpage at the very beginning so that users 
can see directly, where the option/info they are looking for is (i.e. video 
output comes after audio output). I'm having in mind something similar to 
what can be found in DOCS/tech/manpage.txt
b) create something like a bookmark, being a keyword that, when searching for 
it, points you to the beginng of the subsection you are looking for. Of 
course, this would have to be a word that doesn't exist yet.

Personally, it isn't that much important to me personally. But I understand 
when newbies complain about a very long manpage. showing the structure and 
creating bookmarks would be an effort to simplify things somehow. Splitting 
up is no option for me..

Sebastian