I have a vision, … of many courageous and talented experts, coming together, to do this project:
GNU/Linux man pages need to be more easily maintained. They also badly need hyperlinks.
man pages are written in a version of roff using lots of macros, and best edited with emacs, both everyone agrees are ancient.
And software and data languages have come a long ways from those early beginnings. Yet, we still use these antique tools for our modern GNU/Linux documentation. (I imagine that if we could still be documenting in scrolls, there would be those who would staunchly advocate that system.)
What would it take to convert all the man pages to odf (Open Document Format), so they could be editable with LibreOffice Writer, and thus much more richly formatted if desired, but still with a dumbed down text mode output?
It was 34 years ago, that I first used Ventura Publisher, the first graphical WYSIWYG or What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor. It blew my mind and opened up a whole new way of writing documentation. I easily wrote a 100+ page, fully typeset manual in it in just a few weeks. That was remarkable back then.
It will take a team of people to get this done, and my 2nd question is, who they will be? I am too old to be any important part of this project. But I can see what needs to be done. I challenge some of you to consider this.