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.
To validate a manual:
To page a manual in the current locale (if supported) so that non-ASCII special characters render as proper glyphs:
Produce HTML with a style-sheet:
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Last edited by $Author: kristaps $ on $Date: 2012/01/01 15:13:33 $. Copyright © 2011, Kristaps Dzonsons. CC BY-SA.