mandoc (formerly mdocml) — UNIX manpage compiler — current version 1.14.6 (September 23, 2021)

The mandoc UNIX manpage compiler toolset

mandoc is a suite of tools compiling mdoc, the roff macro language of choice for BSD manual pages, and man, the predominant historical language for UNIX manuals. It is small, ISO C, ISC-licensed, and quite fast. The main component of the toolset is the mandoc utility program, based on the libmandoc validating compiler, to format output for UTF-8 and ASCII UNIX terminals, HTML 5, PostScript, and PDF.

mandoc has predominantly been developed on OpenBSD and is both an OpenBSD and a BSD.lv project. We strive to support all interested free operating systems, in particular FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly, illumos, Minix 3, both GNU- and musl-based Linux distributions, and a few non-free systems like macOS, SUN Solaris and IRIX, as well as all systems running the pkgsrc portable package build system. To support mandoc development, consider donating to the OpenBSD foundation.

News

• September 23, 2021: Version 1.14.6 was released with many bug fixes, several improvements of automatic tagging, and the new mdoc(7) .Tg macro. For details, see the release notes.
• March 10, 2019: Version 1.14.5 was released with improvements to tbl(7) output, HTML rendering, low-level roff(7) handling and with many bugfixes.
• December 23, 2018: The GNU troff project released groff-1.22.4 with many incremental improvements, including several that enhance compatibility with recent mandoc.
• September 22, 2018: Ingo Schwarze gave a talk about man.cgi(8) and LibreSSL during EuroBSDCon.
• June 8, 2018: Ingo Schwarze gave a talk about mandoc during BSDCan.

Documentation and help

• For users: mandoc(1) — man(1) — apropos(1) — man.conf(5) — makewhatis(8) — man.cgi(8) — mandocd(8) — catman(8) — soelim(1) — demandoc(1)
• For authors: mdoc(7) & extended documentation — man(7) — roff(7) — mandoc_char(7) — tbl(7) — eqn(7) — Practical UNIX manuals
• For programmers: mandoc(3) — mandoc_escape(3) — mandoc_malloc(3) — mchars_alloc(3) — mandoc.db(5) — OpenBSD porting guide — mandoc_headers(3) — mandoc_html(3) — mansearch(3) — man.cgi(3) — tbl(3) — man.options(1) — TODO list
• Commented documentation index — Online manual page portals: man.bsd.lv — OpenBSD — FreeBSD — Debian – Arch – Void Linux
• Contact the mandoc developers, for example for bug reports or for questions.

Availability and installation

• Systems already including mandoc: No manual installation is required on these systems.
• Newest release tarball — archive of release tarballs — copyright and license — instructions for manual installation
• CVS web interface — Anonymous CVS access

Related information

• release notes — development history — porting history — ChangeLog — commented history index
• Publications and media coverage concerning mandoc
• History of UNIX manpages
• Programs using libmandoc maintained by third parties
• pod2mdoc — a utility to convert perlpod(1) documents to mdoc(7)
• texi2mdoc — a utility to convert GNU Texinfo documents to mdoc(7)
• docbook2mdoc — a utility to convert documents from the commercial OASIS DocBook format to mdoc(7)
• debiman — static website generator for manual page web servers, using mandoc as the HTML generation engine
• archmanweb — manual page web server built on Django, PostgreSQL, mandoc, and pyalpm
• CVSweb — the CGI software behind the CVS web interface listed above
• pta — the plain text accounting program
• Additional web links

Copyright © 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 Kristaps Dzonsons, © 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 Ingo Schwarze, $Date: 2021/09/23 23:10:30 $
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