mdocml – UNIX manpage compiler, current version @VERSION@ (@VDATE@)

Description

mdocml is a suite of tools compiling mdoc, the roff macro package of choice for BSD manual pages, and man, the predominant historical package for UNIX manuals. The mission of mdocml is to deprecate groff, the GNU troff implementation, for displaying mdoc pages whilst providing token support for man.

Why? groff amounts to over 5 MB of source code, most of which is C++ and GPL version 3. It runs slowly, produces uncertain output, and varies in operation from system to system. mdocml strives to fix this (respectively small, C, ISC-licensed, fast and regular).

mdocml consists of the libmandoc validating compiler and mandoc, which interfaces with the compiler library to format output for UNIX terminals (with support for wide-character locales), XHTML, HTML, PostScript, and PDF. It also includes preconv, for recoding multibyte manuals; demandoc, for emitting only text parts of manuals; mandocdb, for indexing manuals; and apropos, whatis, and man.cgi (via catman) for semantic search of manual content. It is a BSD.lv project.

Disambiguation: mdocml is often referred to by its installed binary, mandoc.

Sources

mdocml is in plain-old ANSI C and should build and run on any modern system; however, you'll need libdb to build apropos, whatis, man.cgi, catman, and mandocdb (this is installed by default on BSD UNIX systems — see the Makefile if you're running Linux). To build and install into /usr/local/, just run make install. Be careful: the preconv, apropos, and whatis binary names are usually taken by existing utilities.

Downstream

Several systems come bundled with mdocml utilities. If your system does not appear below, the maintainers have not contacted me and it should not be considered official. Please contact us if you plan on maintaining a downstream version!

DragonFly BSD	contrib/mdocml (1.12.1 sources) lib/libmandoc usr.bin/mandoc (build system)
FreeBSD 10.0, -CURRENT	contrib/mdocml (1.12.1 sources) usr.bin/mandoc (build system)
FreeBSD 9.x, 8.x	ports/textproc/mdocml (1.12.1 port)
NetBSD	src/external/bsd/mdocml (1.12.1 sources plus patches and build system)
OpenBSD	src/usr.bin/mandoc (1.12.2 sources and build system)
pkgsrc	textproc/mdocml (1.12.0 port)
Minix3	external/bsd/mdocml (1.10.9 sources and build system)

Documentation

These manuals are generated automatically and refer to the current release. They are the authoritative documentation for the mdocml system.

apropos(1)	search the manual page database
demandoc(1)	emit only text of UNIX manuals
mandoc(1)	format and display UNIX manuals
preconv(1)	recode multibyte UNIX manuals
whatis(1)	search the manual page database
mandoc(3)	mandoc macro compiler library
tbl(3)	roff table parser library for mandoc
eqn(7)	eqn-mandoc language reference
man(7)	man language reference
man.cgi(7)	cgi for manpage query and display
mandoc_char(7)	mandoc special characters
mdoc(7)	mdoc language reference
roff(7)	roff-mandoc language reference
tbl(7)	tbl-mandoc language reference
catman(8)	update a man.cgi manpage cache
mandocdb(8)	index UNIX manuals

Contact

Use the mailing lists for bug-reports, patches, questions, etc. Please check the TODO for known issues before posting. All lists are subscription-only: send a blank e-mail to the listed address to subscribe. Beyond that, contact Kristaps at kris...@bsd.lv. Archives are available at Gmane.

disc...@mdocml.bsd.lv	bug-reports, general questions, and announcements
tec...@mdocml.bsd.lv	patches and system discussions
sou...@mdocml.bsd.lv	source commit messages

News

23-09-2013: version 1.12.2

The mdoc(7) to man(7) converter, to be called as mandoc -Tman, is now fully functional.

The mandoc(1) utility now supports the -Ios (default operating system) input option, and the -Tutf8 output mode now actually works.

The mandocdb(8) utility no longer truncates existing databases when starting to build new ones, but only replaces them when the build actually succeeds.

The man(7) parser now supports the PD macro (paragraph distance), and (for GNU man-ext compatibility only) EX (example block) and EE (example end). Plus several bugfixes regarding indentation, line breaks, and vertical spacing, and regarding RS following TP.

The roff(7) parser now supports the \f(BI (bold+italic) font escape, the \z (zero cursor advance) escape and the cc (change control character) and it (input line trap) requests. Plus bugfixes regarding the \t (tab) escape, nested escape sequences, and conditional requests.

In mdoc(7), several bugs were fixed related to UTF-8 output of quoting enclosures, delimiter handling, list indentation and horizontal and vertical spacing, formatting of the Lk, %U, and %C macros, plus some bugfixes related to the handling of syntax errors like badly nested font blocks, stray Ta macros outside column lists, unterminated It Xo blocks, and non-text children of Nm blocks.

In tbl(7), the width of horizontal spans and the vertical spacing around tables was corrected, and in man(7) files, a crash was fixed that was triggered by some particular unclosed T{ macros.

For mandoc developers, we now provide a tbl(3) library manual and gmdiff, a very small, very simplistic groff-versus-mandoc output comparison tool.

23-03-2011: version 1.12.1

Significant work on apropos and mandocdb. These tools are now much more robust. A whatis implementation is now handled as an apropos mode. These tools are also able to minimally handle pre-formatted pages, that is, those already formatted by another utility such as GNU troff.

The man.cgi script is also now available for wider testing. It interfaces with mandocdb manuals cached by catman. HTML output is generated on-the-fly by libmandoc or internal methods to convert pre-formatted pages.

The mailing list archive for the discuss and tech lists are being hosted by Gmane at gmane.comp.tools.mdocml.user and gmane.comp.tools.mdocml.devel, respectively.

Lastly, I'm no longer providing binaries, as nobody has asked for them.

See cvsweb for historical notes.