I propose these man pages as a replacement for the contents of the doc
directory.

I prepared them by reverse-nroffing the (uncopyrighted) SVr4 curses
man pages with an Emacs package I wrote for the purpose.  I then rewrote
them extensively, removing passive voice, adding many clarifications, and
cleaning up and tightening the language.

I then went through each man page, checking which entry points are implemented
and adding notes on features not yet implemented, known bugs, and 386/486-
specific caveats.

They have several advantages over the existing manuals.

First: being nroff source, they can be used to generate attractive
documentation either on-screen or on a printer.  It is traditional to
distribute nroff source with UNIX freeware, and I have considered the
already formatted manual of ncurses a serious flaw in the ncurses
package since I first encountered it.

Second: they document both ncurses as it is and (since we've chosen
SVr4 curses as an emulation target) ncurses as we want it to be.  The
format also makes it easy for programmers to be forewarned of restrictions
and problems with the ncurses implementation, without our losing sight of
what the *correct* thing is. 

Third: a consequence of the previous is that, as we improve ncurses,
we can keep the documentation up to date almost entirely by *removing*
text (the caveats and restrictions) and thus have some hope of actually
keeping the documentation in sync with reality.

Fourth: unlike the *.doc files, they can all be included in a system's
manual tree for on-line browsing via man(1).  This is significant, since
BSDI is officially interested in including ncurses in its 1.2 release.

Fifth: they are more accurate than the existing manuals!  I corrected quite
a number of small errors while working on them, especially in regard to
the location of the terminfo database and other file name changes.  There is
also considerable new information about undocumented capabilities in the
new terminfo.5 page.

Sixth: everywhere appropriate, macros have been provided to parametrize
away the location of the terminfo database directory, and which section the
special-file man pages are in (4 or 5).  These macros are defined as
\*d and \*n near the top of each file that uses them.

The files in this set replace the following files in the 1.8.2 distribution:

manual.doc
ncurses.doc
term.doc
terminfo.doc
tic.doc
untic.doc

These files are inconsistent with the new man pages (and with reality) and
should be discarded.  This is the entire doc directory except for the
Installation and changes.doc files.


