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Date:      Tue, 07 Aug 2001 17:42:33 -0700
From:      Dima Dorfman <dima@unixfreak.org>
To:        Murray Stokely <murray.stokely@windriver.com>
Cc:        freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: rethinking man page references in the Handbook 
Message-ID:  <20010808004238.9A9E13E31@bazooka.unixfreak.org>
In-Reply-To: <20010807170037.O23183@windriver.com>; from murray.stokely@windriver.com on "Tue, 7 Aug 2001 17:00:37 -0700"

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Murray Stokely <murray.stokely@windriver.com> writes:
>   I think there are two problems with the way we currently refer to
> man pages in the FreeBSD Handbook.  First of all, there is no
> consistency to how we refer the user to a man page for more
> information :
> 
> 1) Please see sio(4).
> 2) For more information see sio(4).
> 3) For more information see the sio(4) man page.
> 4) For more information see the man page sio(4).
> 5) For more information see the sio(4) manual page.

I'd prefer to see them called "manual pages" over "man pages"; the
latter may not be very clear to some people, since "man" is a common
word by itself, and not everybody can immediately make the man->manual
connection.

>   The second problem is that we simply use &man.cmd.sec; entities too
> often.  There are many paragraphs that contain the same man entity 4-5
> times which is very distracting.  These entities are very useful but I
> think that we should only use them them the first time that a command
> is mentioned in a section, and then markup the command in <command>
> for future references in that paragraph and following ones.

Nobody has ever defined when one should use a manual page entity, and
when one should use <command>.  I've seen this asked on the list
before, and the answer is generally "whichever you want".  What you
suggest sounds pretty good.

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