LaTeX is a great typesetting system, just not for manual pages. It is frustrating in the extreme having to wade through a GNU info "page" like one does through a web browser when one is in a datacenter trying to solve a priority 1 incident.

LaTeX is a sucessor of TeX, which was designed with the goal of writing academic research papers, with a specific focus on mathematics research, not writing reference documentation; it is great for what it is designed to do, however it was not designed to be an online reference manual system, and it shows in the browser-like nature of the GNU info usage paradigm.

Manual pages have a certain structure, which, when one understands it, makes them extremely efficient at locating the information:

SYNOPSIS

shows me the valid forms of using the command in question, in one to three concise lines.

OPTIONS

lists all the available options which might not be present in the examples, but which I might need.

EXAMPLES

the most important part of a manual page; on GNU/Linux, this part is usually non-existent, but on UNIX, the EXAMPLES is almost always there, and it almost always contains several detailed treatises on how to use the command, system call, or a library in question. After SYNOPSIS, this is the first part I jump to with the "/" character (forward search in less(1)), and often contains enough information for me to start using the program in question and be productive immediately.

SEE ALSO

If I cannot remember exactly which command I am looking for, but I know commands related to it, just by calling up the manual page of the related command, I can look in the SEE ALSO section and find the manual for the command I could not remember.

FILES

provides which files are affected. This information is vital when knowing which files to inspect, monitor, or modify.

AVAILABILITY

Sometimes, I just need to know which package a file or a command belongs to, whether it is multithreading-safe ("MT safe"), or whether the interface I am about to use is stable, uncommitted, deprecated, or external; AVAILABILITY section will tell me that. This section also does not exist on GNU/Linux, where it is science fiction for the developer to have even thought about forward and backward compatibility; often times, the Linux developers are so undisciplined that they do not even deliver built in documentation, and the manual page is written by someone else as a placeholder, and AVAILABILITY section won't exist in it, because the third party that wrote the manual page cannot know that. For example, Debian GNU/Linux often has such manual pages. That is unthinkable and intolerable on UNIX!

By convention, all the manual pages on UNIX contain these (and additional) sections. The order of locating pertinent information in a manual page, then, becomes as follows:

1. SYNOPSIS;

2. EXAMPLES;

3. OPTIONS;

4. SEE ALSO;

5. FILES;

6. AVAILABILITY.

With the order of scanning listed above, I often locate the pertinent information within five seconds, up to 35 seconds maximum (we timed it, ten runs, did the average, mean, and median, and corrected for standard deviation).

GNU info on the other hand, I'm stuck in trying to navigate "topics" as if I were in a web browser. The navigation is haphazard because everybody has their own idea of what the documentation to their program should look like, something that is well defined and uniform in the manual pages.

When you are troubleshooting a problem or need to scan through large amount of documentation quickly and efficiently, if you understand the structure (1 - user commands, 1M (or 8 on BSD and GNU/Linux) - system administration commands, 2 - system calls, 3C - standard C library, 3LIB - libraries, 4 (or 5 on GNU/Linux) - file formats, 5 - standards and macros, 6 - games, 7 - special files, 7D - device drivers, 9 - device driver interfaces), searching through the correct manual page becomes even faster, like a search on steroids, or with a twin turbo and a supercharger combined.

None of that structure is present in a GNU info manual; there, as is usual with GNU/Linux, it's a "free for all".

Any software I write is delivered with a manual page strictly following norms described above, because on UNIX, that is what we do, and it would be shameful and unprofessional not to do it (shoddy product), even if what one writes is freeware, in one's spare time. It's completely unacceptable and unthinkable to deliver a piece of software without a manual page. We have completely different quality standards and expectations of software on UNIX, even for free and gratis software.

This book, sometimes available in printed form and as a free PDF, explains how to use the nroff typesetting system:

http://oreilly.com/openbook/utp/UnixTextProcessing.pdf

the book is gratis to download, as it has been out of print for several decades, but it is invaluable when learning how to typeset documents with nroff(1), including manual pages.