Half a century after its creation, the man page format remains a good template for technical documentation and more.
Only needed for actual man pages meant to be installed on a Linux system. (But worth keeping in mind anyway.) The section number is used as file extension in that case.
Sections 5, 6 and 7 are of general interest, as they go beyond the technicalities of an operating system.
Of interest to anyone with an account on the system.
For low-level kernel stuff(?)
Mostly for C, Perl and Tcl.
Advanced OS usage.
Apparently intended for reference documentation. Overviews and such should probably go in (7) below.
Doesn't have to be computer games. For example Risus, "the anything RPG", can be easily made into a manual page.
On Linux, manual page guidelines are documented in man-pages(7); on NetBSD, they're in mdoc(7) instead.
For administrators.
This document only includes section headers used in most manual pages, not only for commands and/or functions. The list can be added to or trimmed, but standard sections used at all should appear in order and with these names.
Subsections are allowed, but the number of levels should be kept minimal.
Subject - one-line description after a dash
Can list multiple commands or whatever as one logical group.
Doesn't have to be long or detailed.
Best interpreted loosely. For example, in a tabletop RPG optional rules can go here.
For software, this means files used by the program during normal operation, such as config and so on. Other kinds of projects will require creativity.
Exactly that.
Arguably makes sense only for software. Or does it?
Just enough to get people started with common use cases.
Linux documentation guidelines say not to use this. Obviously that doesn't apply to other projects. Contact information goes here.
For licensing and ownership information(?)
Lists other manual pages normally, but might need to be interpreted flexibly in some cases.
pod2man and pod2html. The latter in particular emits very clean markup. recommended!
rst2man from the docutils suite.
pydoc / pydoc3 tool generates documentation in a very similar format.