There are other systems for software documentation. We cannot say whether it
belongs to the user-oriented or developer-oriented group about neither one of
them. Every one of them was created with a certain particular aim, which it has
followed. These contain:
PerlDoc is a
documentation system used by the community around a script language Perl. The thing that helped its
growth is the existence of CPAN
- archive of reusable code for Perl. The documentation is written
straight into the source code using special POD marks. Users then
access it using Perl system script perldoc. There are
many converters of PerlDoc documentation into different output
formats, including HTML.
The documentation system of system manual pages (man pages) has
been created in the times of creation of the operating system
UNIX and is actively developed to these days. To format the
output, we use the nroff program and pages are displayed with
the man command. They come along on almost every UNIX or
GNU/Linux system. Every man page is
compressed and saved on the disk separately. There are tools for its conversion
to other formats.
The result of the GNU movement (GNU is not
UNIX) is info documentation, which is trying to
substitute the man pages. This documentation system is not being used as much as
its creators would expect due to its complicated control and user-unfriendly
look. However, most of the GNU tools still includes more detailed
documentation in its info pages than in corresponding
man pages. The pages can be displayed with the info
command.
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