[da39a3ee]

Yes, it is. But MacOS (and Windows) are popular OSs for laptop users. I'm the maintainer of a command line tool that is reasonably popular and I believe that the majority of my users are MacOS. So the question is quite concrete for me -- should I provide documentation in the form of a man page? I do not currently, for the reasons I gave above (although I made a mistake in saying Linux when I meant Linux and *BSD for which I deserve what I get!) But I'd appreciate it being pointed out if my thinking is wrong here.

[enriquto]

> should I provide documentation in the form of a man page?

Yes, and this may be a much smaller effort than you suspect. Only by writing the output of --help in a certain order, you can use the "help2man" tool to generate a beautiful manpage automatically. Notice that your users do not need to have help2man installed, you run it yourself as part of your build process, to create the manpage from the latest source code.

It is very likely that if your tool already has a --help option, you don't really need to do anything to have a manpage. Just call help2man from your makefile.

[da39a3ee]

It would be cool if help2man worked perfectly. In fact the output needs a few fixups -- it looks like it has problems with non-ASCII characters?

But if those fixups can be made automatically it's not bad and I agree might be worth adding to the build.

[enriquto]

Yes, the output of help2man is not perfect. My main gripe is that it imposes a rather strict format for the manpage, and not all manpage markup is available. But it is better than not having a manpage at all.

The problem with non-ascii characters can be solved, though. Just add an option like "-L en_US.UTF-8" to the help2man call.

[da39a3ee]

Thanks. However, now help2man is outputting the unicode character correctly, but `man $help2manOutput` is displaying things like `a(R)` and `a` instead of the unicode character. I've also tried with the `LOCALE=en_US.UTF-8` env var set.

[enriquto]

This sounds like a problem with your pager, that is used to scroll the output of man pages in the terminal. Do accents appear correctly on other manpages in your system? If I recall correctly, on macos catalina I had to set my locale variable LC_CTYPE (and not LOCALE) so that the less pager recognized the accents.

[da39a3ee]

I don't think it's a pager problem for the following reasons:

- If I do `man help2manOutput | cat` then it does not page, but I still see `a` and `a(R)` in place of the desired unicode characters

- `less help2manOutput` renders them correctly

- In general I have no problem viewing unicode characters in less: I'm familiar with env vars such as LESS and PAGER.