Ron : Humane text format and toolchain for creating UNIX man pages

I'm a little bit worried about the proliferation of text-based formats like this. Currently we have MarkDown, ReStructured Text, Textile, AsciiDoc, Perl's POD, Wikipedia Wiki markup, and now this. When you pick one of these, you gamble that the one you chose won't fade into oblivion, forcing you to convert all your documentation. Some of them have features that others do not, making an informed choice even more difficult.<p>I don't know what the answer is, but it makes me hesitant to use any of them.

Perl's Pod (Plain Old Documentation) is actually a pretty humane format that exports to manpage, HTML, text, etc: <a href="http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html" rel="nofollow">http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html</a><p>We did all of our command line tool man pages in it, and it only took a few minutes to get up to speed on the syntax.

So obvious but very neatly done. POD is like this for perlish folks.

FWIW, pandoc is a Markdown-based tool that does all this very nicely: <a href="http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/" rel="nofollow">http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/</a>

From its man page:<p>" BUGS<p>Ron is written in Ruby and depends on nokogiri and rdiscount, native extension libraries that are non-trivial to install on some systems. A more portable version of this program would be welcome. "