mandoc (mdocml)

The mandoc utility is a specialised mdoc formatter: although it also supports some other UNIX manual formats, it does not accept general-purpose roff input. Development began in 2008 to replace groff with an ISC licensed, high-speed reimplementation.

mandoc may be invoked as troff or nroff as its command-line arguments overlap. It supports the classical terminal and PS forms, and has very strong support for HTML and XHTML. PDF output is supported as well.

By considering mdoc as a special language, mandoc compiles its input into a representation of semantic content. This diverges from troff and its descendants, which compile mdoc into its basis form, roff, then into a presentational representation. As such, mandoc is also used for semantically querying manual content and for the rigorous validation of manuals.

The mandoc utility is supported on both UNIX and non-UNIX operating systems.

Examples

To validate a manual:

mandoc -Tlint file.1

To page a manual in the current locale (if supported) so that non-ASCII special characters render as proper glyphs:

mandoc -Tlocale file.1 | less

Produce HTML with a style-sheet:

mandoc -Thtml -Ostyle=file.css file.1 >file.1.html

Last edited by $Author: kristaps $ on $Date: 2012/01/01 15:13:33 $. Copyright © 2011, Kristaps Dzonsons. CC BY-SA.