Dear Volodya, Have you also given any consideration to how the descriptions wrap around if they are too long? For long descriptions, they can be quite ugly if left as is. At the moment, I output the description to a stringstream and wrap and indent everything post factum using the ": " in the output (I supply an optional line length for wrapping). This is fine and produces really nice output including embedded \n in the description text, but I wouldn't mind a more general solution. A minor nit pick, with option groups (chained options_description), the colons for the same group align but not across groups. Perhaps it might be possible to also dump the various fields of the output to some vector or even a templated callback object for greater flexibility of output. Llew Leo Goodstadt MRC Functional Genetics Unit Department of Human Anatomy and Genetics South Parks Road Oxford OX1 3QX United Kingdom leo.goodstadt@anatomy.oxford.ac.uk