The manual pages

The Man Pages

Online versions of the man pages for Tcl and Tk can be found at:

This wiki also has documentation for a lot of the Tcl and Tk commands. The fundamental charter of Tcl is the "Dodekalogue". The Wiki Endekalogue page lists translations (of the Tcl reference page) to more languages. Check the manpages page for a list of more.

Other ways to read the man pages

Among the ways to access "the manual pages" are

Foreign Language Translations

Translated manual pages

Other documentation considerations

When writing documentation, a developer has to decide in what form to provide the documentation. There are various tools available to assist in this.

There are Tcl specific tools, such as dtp/doctools software, which provides the ability to write doc in a general form, then to generate various file formats for display purposes. TMML and dtp are two tools designed to help Tcl developers document Tcl extensions and applications. Others can found at the Source Documentation Tools page.

There is a tool called txt2man (see http://freshmeat.net/projects/txt2man/ ) which is said to convert plain ASCII text into man page format.


Fabricio Rocha - 05 May 2011 - I wonder if we Tclers could develop (or use) a tool for converting/filtering HTML to man, something that is surely possible. I ask this because once I read DKF explaining that the online versions of the man pages are so simple and ugly because they have to be in the "minimal denominator" format for allowing easier updates for both online versions and the man pages themselves. IMHO, this is a too severe limitation, specially for the Tk pages, which is not really needed. Mark Roseman created a beautiful, colorful TkDocs website with illustrations that, in my opinion, might and should be part of the online manual pages, so they would be much more friendly and clear to new Tclers. Of course man has its fans and is pretty useful when you're offline, but it does not need to dictate the formatting of pages in a multimedia web...