[erlang-questions] Erlang documentation -- a modest proposal

[Loïc Hoguin]

On 09/23/2016 05:35 PM, Kenneth Lundin wrote:
>     So what's wrong and what could we do?
>
>     1) Things are not beautiful
>
>        I agree - the documentation is not typographically beautiful
>
>        Personally I like PDF - I took a look and found this:
>
>        http://www.latextemplates.com/template/the-legrand-orange-book
>     <http://www.latextemplates.com/template/the-legrand-orange-book>
>
>        It would be nice to transform the documentation into this form
>        for printing and reading
>
>
> I am actually thinking that we don't need PDF at all. HTML should be enough.
> Man pages can also be questioned since they are limiting when it comes
> to format.
> Would be interesting to know how much use there is of our man pages?.

I use the man pages almost on a daily basis, so much that I added them 
to MANPATH and can just "man erlang" and such. I rely on them even more 
when I have little or no connection to Internet. I go online mostly for 
the user guides and for searching using erldoc when I can't remember names.

Of note, Cowboy and Ranch have had man pages for a few years now, and 
are typically my go-to when I forget something. The inspiration for 
making those available as man pages actually comes from Erlang's man 
pages. I do not know how many people use those though, probably not a lot.

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
http://ninenines.eu
Author of The Erlanger Playbook,
A book about software development using Erlang