mandoc — UNIX manpage compiler — documentation

Documentation for the mandoc toolset

Manual pages

The following manual pages form the authoritative documentation for the mandoc toolset. They refer to the current release. The toolset consists of the following components:

For users to read and search manuals

mandoc(1): format and display manuals
man(1): display manual pages
apropos(1): semantic search for manual content
man.conf(5): configuration file for man
makewhatis(8): build a database for searching manuals
man.cgi(8): CGI program to search and display manual pages
mandocd(8): server process to format manual pages in batch mode
catman(8): format all manual pages below a directory
soelim(1): interpret .so requests in manual pages
demandoc(1): extract the bare text of manuals, removing markup

For authors to write and maintain manuals

mdoc(7): semantic markup language for formatting manual pages
man(7): legacy formatting language for manual pages
roff(7): roff language reference for mandoc
mandoc_char(7): roff special character reference for mandoc
tbl(7): table formatting language reference for mandoc
eqn(7): equation formatting language reference for mandoc

For programmers using libmandoc

mandoc(3): the mandoc macro compiler library
mandoc_escape(3): parse roff escape sequences
mandoc_malloc(3): memory allocation function wrappers used in the mandoc library
mchars_alloc(3): character table for mandoc
mandoc.db(5): manual page database

For programmers working on mandoc itself

mandoc_headers(3): ordering of mandoc include files
mandoc_html(3): internals of the mandoc HTML formatter
mansearch(3): search manual page databases
man.cgi(3): internals of the CGI program to search and display manual pages
tbl(3): the roff table parser library for mandoc
man.options(1): assignment of option letters in manual page utilities

Additional documentation

The following additional documentation is available:

Extended documentation for the mdoc language: Containing hints for getting started, various style guides, a few gory details, and an alphabetic index.
Practical UNIX Manuals: An mdoc tutorial by Kristaps Dzonsons
OpenBSD porting guide: This chapter of the porting guide explains what to consider regarding manual pages when porting software to OpenBSD. Part of that information may also be of interest when porting software to other operating systems.

Ask for help!

If the above documents didn't answer your questions or if you have suggestions for improvement, please contact the mandoc mailing lists or developers.