mandoc/mandoc.1 - diff

Return to mandoc.1 CVS log

Up to [cvsweb.bsd.lv] / mandoc

Diff for /mandoc/mandoc.1 between version 1.231 and 1.265

version 1.231, 2018/11/22 11:30:23

version 1.265, 2023/10/18 14:34:29

Line 1

.\" $Id$

.\"

.\" Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any

.\" purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above

Line 52 The options are as follows:

If the standard output is a terminal device and

.Fl c

is not specified, use

.Xr more 1

.Xr less 1

to paginate the output, just like

.Xr man 1

would.

.It Fl c

Copy the formatted manual pages to the standard output without using

.Xr more 1

.Xr less 1

to paginate them.

This is the default.

It can be specified to override

Line 222 reads from standard input.

.Pp

The options

.Fl fhklw

are also supported and are documented in man(1).

are also supported and are documented in

.Xr man 1 .

.Fl f

and

Line 256 where

Line 257 where

is the back-space character number 8.

Emboldened characters are rendered as

.Sq c Ns \e[bs] Ns c .

This markup is typically converted to appropriate terminal sequences by

the pager or

.Xr ul 1 .

To remove the markup, pipe the output to

.Xr col 1

.Fl b

instead.

.Pp

The special characters documented in

.Xr mandoc_char 7

are rendered best-effort in an ASCII equivalent.

In particular, opening and closing

.Sq single quotes

are represented as characters number 0x60 and 0x27, respectively,

which agrees with all ASCII standards from 1965 to the latest

revision (2012) and which matches the traditional way in which

.Xr roff 7

formatters represent single quotes in ASCII output.

This correct ASCII rendering may look strange with modern

Unicode-compatible fonts because contrary to ASCII, Unicode uses

the code point U+0060 for the grave accent only, never for an opening

quote.

.Pp

The following

.Fl O

Line 282 Format

Line 301 Format

input files in

.Xr mdoc 7

output style.

Specifically, this suppresses the two additional blank lines near the

This prints the operating system name rather than the page title

top and the bottom of each page, and it implies

on the right side of the footer line, and it implies

.Fl O Cm indent Ns =5 .

One useful application is for checking that

.Fl T Cm man

Line 300 If no

Line 319 If no

is specified, reuse the first command line argument that is not a

.Ar section

number.

This is useful when it is the name of a manual page,

If that argument is in

in particular the name of a library function.

.Xr apropos 1

.Ar key Ns = Ns Ar val

format, only the

.Ar val

is used rather than the argument as a whole.

This is useful for commands like

.Ql man -akO tag Ic=ulimit

to search for a keyword and jump right to its definition

in the matching manual pages.

.It Cm width Ns = Ns Ar width

The output width is set to

.Ar width

Line 315 and may exceed the output width.

Line 342 and may exceed the output width.

Output produced by

.Fl T Cm html

conforms to HTML5 using optional self-closing tags.

Default styles use only CSS1.

Equations rendered from

.Xr eqn 7

blocks use MathML.

.Pp

The

.Pa mandoc.css

file documents style-sheet classes available for customising output.

If a style-sheet is not specified with

.Fl O Cm style ,

.Fl T Cm html

defaults to simple output (via an embedded style-sheet)

readable in any graphical or text-based web

browser.

.Pp

Non-ASCII characters are rendered

as hexadecimal Unicode character references.

.Pp

Line 380 otherwise, the second format is used.

Line 395 otherwise, the second format is used.

.It Cm style Ns = Ns Ar style.css

The file

.Ar style.css

is used for an external style-sheet.

is used as an external stylesheet.

This must be a valid absolute or

relative URI.

.Pp

Using the file

.Pa mandoc.css

that is distributed with

.Nm

is recommended.

It provides an appearance similar to terminal output with some additional

features specific to

.Nm

HTML output, in particular making anchor locations that support

deep linking stand out visually by putting a dotted line under them,

providing tooltips showing the semantic function of elements (macro

names), providing some simple aspects of responsive web design, and

providing simple support for users who prefer a dark color scheme.

.Pp

Using a custom CSS file is possible, but writing it requires

proficiency in all of the languages HTML 5, CSS 4, and

.Xr mdoc 7

and familiarity with the

.Nm Ns -specific

classes used in

.Pa mandoc.css .

Besides, while the file

.Pa mandoc.css

is always adapted to the HTML output generated by the

.Nm

version it is distributed with, maintaining a custom CSS file usually

requires adaptations each time

.Nm

is upgraded to a new version.

.Pp

If a stylesheet is not specified with

.Fl O Cm style ,

.Fl T Cm html

embeds a minimal stylesheet into the HTML output, mostly to select

adequate font-style and font-weight attributes for various macros.

The result is readable in any graphical or text-based web browser,

but does not aim for looking similar to terminal output.

Instead, formatting is mostly left to browser defaults

and to user settings in the browser configuration.

.It Cm tag Ns Op = Ns Ar term

Same syntax and semantics as for

.Sx ASCII Output .

This is implemented by passing a

.Ic file://

URI ending in a fragment identifier to the pager

rather than passing merely a file name.

When using this argument, use a pager supporting such URIs, for example

.Bd -literal -offset 3n

MANPAGER='lynx -force_html' man -T html -O tag=MANPAGER man

MANPAGER='w3m -T text/html' man -T html -O tag=toc mandoc

.Ed

.Pp

Consequently, for HTML output, this argument does not work with

.Xr more 1

.Xr less 1 .

For example,

.Ql MANPAGER=less man -T html -O tag=toc mandoc

does not work because

.Xr less 1

does not support

.Ic file://

URIs.

.It Cm toc

If an input file contains at least two non-standard sections,

print a table of contents near the beginning of the output.

Line 416 This is useful for distributing manual sources to lega

Line 495 This is useful for distributing manual sources to lega

lacking

.Xr mdoc 7

formatters.

Embedded

.Xr eqn 7

and

.Xr tbl 7

code is not supported.

.Pp

If the input format of a file is

.Xr man 7 ,

the input is copied to the output, expanding any

the input is copied to the output.

.Xr roff 7

.Ic so

requests.

The parser is also run, and as usual, the

.Fl W

level controls which

Line 434 Use

Line 515 Use

to translate

.Xr mdoc 7

input to the markdown format conforming to

.Lk http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax.text\

.Lk https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax.text\

"John Gruber's 2004 specification" .

The output also almost conforms to the

.Lk http://commonmark.org/ CommonMark

.Lk https://commonmark.org/ CommonMark

specification.

.Pp

The character set used for the markdown output is ASCII.

Line 601 It never affects the interpretation of input files.

Line 682 It never affects the interpretation of input files.

Any non-empty value of the environment variable

.Ev MANPAGER

is used instead of the standard pagination program,

.Xr more 1 ;

.Xr less 1 ;

see

.Xr man 1

for details.

Line 615 Specifies the pagination program to use when

Line 696 Specifies the pagination program to use when

.Ev MANPAGER

is not defined.

If neither PAGER nor MANPAGER is defined,

.Xr more 1

.Xr less 1

.Fl s

is used.

Only used if

.Fl a

Line 671 No input files have been read.

Line 751 No input files have been read.

.It 6

An operating system error occurred, for example exhaustion

of memory, file descriptors, or process table entries.

Such errors cause

Such errors may cause

.Nm

to exit at once, possibly in the middle of parsing or formatting a file.

.El

Line 683 output mode implies

Line 763 output mode implies

.Sh EXAMPLES

To page manuals to the terminal:

.Pp

.Dl $ mandoc -l mandoc.1 man.1 apropos.1 makewhatis.8

.Dl $ mandoc -a mandoc.1 man.1 apropos.1 makewhatis.8

.Pp

To produce HTML manuals with

.Pa mandoc.css

.Pa /usr/share/misc/mandoc.css

as the style-sheet:

as the stylesheet:

.Pp

.Dl $ mandoc \-T html -O style=mandoc.css mdoc.7 \*(Gt mdoc.7.html

.Dl $ mandoc \-T html -O style=/usr/share/misc/mandoc.css mdoc.7 > mdoc.7.html

.Pp

To check over a large set of manuals:

.Pp

Line 697 To check over a large set of manuals:

Line 777 To check over a large set of manuals:

.Pp

To produce a series of PostScript manuals for A4 paper:

.Pp

.Dl $ mandoc \-T ps \-O paper=a4 mdoc.7 man.7 \*(Gt manuals.ps

.Dl $ mandoc \-T ps \-O paper=a4 mdoc.7 man.7 > manuals.ps

.Pp

Convert a modern

.Xr mdoc 7

Line 707 format, for use on systems lacking an

Line 787 format, for use on systems lacking an

.Xr mdoc 7

parser:

.Pp

.Dl $ mandoc \-T man foo.mdoc \*(Gt foo.man

.Dl $ mandoc \-T man foo.mdoc > foo.man

.Sh DIAGNOSTICS

Messages displayed by

.Nm

follow this format:

.Bd -ragged -offset indent

.Nm :

.Ar file : Ns Ar line : Ns Ar column : level : message : macro args

.Ar file : Ns Ar line : Ns Ar column : level : message : macro argument ...

.Pq Ar os

.Ed

.Pp

Line and column numbers start at 1.

The first three fields identify the

.Ar file

name,

.Ar line

number, and

.Ar column

number of the input file where the message was triggered.

The line and column numbers start at 1.

Both are omitted for messages referring to an input file as a whole.

Macro names and arguments are omitted where meaningless.

All

.Ar level

and

.Ar message

strings are explained below.

The name of the

.Ar macro

triggering the message and its arguments are omitted where meaningless.

The

.Ar os

operating system specifier is omitted for messages that are relevant

Line 735 fields.

Line 829 fields.

.Pp

Message levels have the following meanings:

.Bl -tag -width "warning"

.It Cm syserr

An operating system error occurred.

There isn't necessarily anything wrong with the input files.

Output may all the same be missing or incomplete.

.It Cm badarg

Invalid command line arguments were specified.

No input files have been read and no output is produced.

.It Cm unsupp

An input file uses unsupported low-level

.Xr roff 7

Line 760 message levels, the

Line 861 message levels, the

.Cm style

level tries to reduce the probability that issues go unnoticed,

so it may occasionally issue bogus suggestions.

Please use your good judgement to decide whether any particular

Use your judgement to decide whether any particular

.Cm style

suggestion really justifies a change to the input file.

.It Cm base

Line 783 Messages of the

Line 884 Messages of the

.Cm error ,

and

.Cm unsupp

levels except those about non-existent or unreadable input files

levels are hidden unless their level, or a lower level, is requested using a

are hidden unless their level, or a lower level, is requested using a

.Fl W

option or

.Fl T Cm lint

Line 848 generated by CVS

Line 948 generated by CVS

.Ic NetBSD

keyword substitution as conventionally used in these operating systems.

.It Sy "referenced manual not found"

.Pq mdoc

.Ic \&Xr

macro references a manual page that is not found in the base system.

The path to look for base system manuals is configurable at compile

time and defaults to

.Pa /usr/share/man : /usr/X11R6/man .

.El

.Ss Style suggestions

.Bl -ohang

Line 942 list contains two consecutive

Line 1034 list contains two consecutive

entries describing the same

.Ic \&Er

number.

.It Sy "referenced manual not found"

.Pq mdoc

.Ic \&Xr

macro references a manual page that was not found.

When running with

.Fl W Cm base ,

the search is restricted to the base system, by default to

.Pa /usr/share/man : Ns Pa /usr/X11R6/man .

This path can be configured at compile time using the

.Dv MANPATH_BASE

preprocessor macro.

When running with

.Fl W Cm style ,

the search is done along the full search path as described in the

.Xr man 1

manual page, respecting the

.Fl m

and

.Fl M

command line options, the

.Ev MANPATH

environment variable, the

.Xr man.conf 5

file and falling back to the default of

.Pa /usr/share/man : Ns Pa /usr/X11R6/man : Ns Pa /usr/local/man ,

also configurable at compile time using the

.Dv MANPATH_DEFAULT

preprocessor macro.

.It Sy "trailing delimiter"

.Pq mdoc

The last argument of an

Line 971 An

Line 1092 An

request occurs even though the document already switched to no-fill mode

and did not switch back to fill mode yet.

It has no effect.

.It Sy "input text line longer than 80 bytes"

Consider breaking the input text line

at one of the blank characters before column 80.

.It Sy "verbatim \(dq--\(dq, maybe consider using \e(em"

.Pq mdoc

Even though the ASCII output device renders an em-dash as

Line 1024 macro lacks the mandatory section argument.

Line 1148 macro lacks the mandatory section argument.

The section number in a

.Ic \&Dt

line is invalid, but still used.

.It Sy "missing date, using today's date"

.It Sy "filename/section mismatch"

.Pq mdoc , man

The name of the input file being processed is known and its file

name extension starts with a non-zero digit, but the

.Ic \&Dt

.Ic \&TH

macro contains a

.Ar section

argument that starts with a different non-zero digit.

The

.Ar section

argument is used as provided anyway.

Consider checking whether the file name or the argument need a correction.

.It Sy "missing date, using \(dq\(dq"

.Pq mdoc, man

The document was parsed as

.Xr mdoc 7

Line 1362 A

Line 1500 A

.Ic \&Bl ,

.Ic \&D1 ,

.Ic \&Dl ,

.Ic \&MT ,

.Ic \&RS ,

.Ic \&UR

.Ic \&RS

block contains nothing in its body and will produce no output.

.It Sy "empty argument, using 0n"

.Pq mdoc

Line 1642 request or a

Line 1778 request or a

layout modifier has an unknown

.Ar font

argument.

.It Sy "ignoring distance argument"

.Pq roff

In addition to the margin character, an

.Ic \&mc

request has a second argument supposed to represent a distance, but the

.Nm

implementation of

.Ic \&mc

always ignores the second argument.

.It Sy "odd number of characters in request"

.Pq roff

Line 1657 The meaning of blank input lines is only well-defined

Line 1802 The meaning of blank input lines is only well-defined

In fill mode, line breaks of text input lines are not supposed to be

significant.

However, for compatibility with groff, blank lines in fill mode

are replaced with

are formatted like

.Ic \&sp

requests.

To request a paragraph break, use

.Ic \&Pp

instead of a blank line.

.It Sy "tab in filled text"

.Pq mdoc , man

The meaning of tab characters is only well-defined in non-fill mode:

Line 1673 it is hard to predict which tab stop position the tab

Line 1821 it is hard to predict which tab stop position the tab

.Pq mdoc

A new sentence starts in the middle of a text line.

Start it on a new input line to help formatters produce correct spacing.

.It Sy "invalid escape sequence"

.It Sy "invalid escape sequence argument"

.Pq roff

An escape sequence has an invalid opening argument delimiter, lacks the

The argument of an escape sequence is of an invalid form.

closing argument delimiter, or the argument has too few characters.

Invalid escape sequences are ignored.

If the argument is incomplete,

.It Sy "undefined escape, printing literally"

.Ic \e*

.Pq roff

and

In an escape sequence, the first character

.Ic \en

right after the leading backslash is invalid.

expand to an empty string,

That character is printed literally,

.Ic \eB

which is equivalent to ignoring the backslash.

to the digit

.Sq 0 ,

and

.Ic \ew

to the length of the incomplete argument.

All other invalid escape sequences are ignored.

.It Sy "undefined string, using \(dq\(dq"

.Pq roff

If a string is used without being defined before,

Line 1752 The invalid character is discarded.

Line 1894 The invalid character is discarded.

A table layout specification contains an opening parenthesis,

but no matching closing parenthesis.

The rest of the input line, starting from the parenthesis, has no effect.

.It Sy "ignoring excessive spacing in tbl layout"

.Pq tbl

A spacing modifier in a table layout is unreasonably large.

The default spacing of 3n is used instead.

.It Sy "tbl without any data cells"

.Pq tbl

A table does not contain any data cells.

Line 1956 and expands to the empty string.

Line 2102 and expands to the empty string.

.Pq roff

The argument of the escape sequence \e$ is not a digit;

the escape sequence expands to the empty string.

.It Sy "negative argument, using 0"

.Pq roff

.Ic \&shift

request has a negative argument

or an argument that is negative due to integer overflow.

Macro argument numbering remains unchanged.

.It Sy "NOT IMPLEMENTED: Bd -file"

.Pq mdoc

For security reasons, the

Line 1991 The first argument of a

Line 2144 The first argument of a

request is neither a single ASCII character

nor a single character escape sequence.

The request is ignored including all its arguments.

.It Sy "skipping unusable escape sequence"

.Pq roff

The first argument of an

.Ic mc

request is neither a single ASCII character

nor a single character escape sequence.

All arguments are ignored and printing of a margin character is disabled.

.It Sy "missing manual name, using \(dq\(dq"

.Pq mdoc

The first call to

Line 2136 with invalid arguments

Line 2296 with invalid arguments

.El

The excess arguments are ignored.

.El

.Ss "Errors related to escape sequences"

.Bl -ohang

.It Sy "incomplete escape sequence"

.Pq roff

The end of the input line is encountered

while parsing the argument of an escape sequence.

In this case,

.Ic \e*

and

.Ic \en

expand to an empty string,

.Ic \eB

to the digit

.Sq 0 ,

and

.Ic \ew

to the length of the incomplete argument.

All other incomplete escape sequences are ignored.

.It Sy "invalid special character"

.Pq roff

A special character escape sequence is invalid,

for example a Unicode sequence pointing to a surrogate

or beyond the Unicode range, a \e[char...] escape sequence

representing a control character or pointing beyond the

.Vt unsigned char

range, or an invalid variable-length form

of a single-byte character escape sequence, for example writing

.Qq \e[e]

.Qq \e[~]

instead of

.Qq \ee

.Qq \e~ ,

respectively.

The escape sequence is ignored.

.It Sy "unknown special character"

.Pq roff

The name given in a special character escape sequence is not known to

.Nm .

The escape sequence is ignored.

.It Sy "invalid escape argument delimiter"

.Pq roff

An escape sequence that expects a numerical argument

attempts to employ one of the characters

.Qq " %&()*+-./0123456789:<=>"

as an argument delimiter.

The escape sequence is ignored including the invalid opening delimiter

and the rest of the argument may appear as output text.

While various characters can be used as argument delimiters,

using the apostrophe-quote character

.Pq Sq \(aq

is recommended for readability and robustness.

.El

.Ss Unsupported features

.Bl -ohang

.It Sy "input too large"

Line 2154 implementations but not by

Line 2368 implementations but not by

.Nm

was found in an input file.

It is replaced by a question mark.

.It Sy "unsupported escape sequence"

.Pq roff

An input file contains an escape sequence supported by GNU troff

or Heirloom troff but not by

.Nm ,

and it is likely that this will cause information loss

or considerable misformatting.

.It Sy "unsupported roff request"

.Pq roff

An input file contains a

Line 2181 or

Line 2402 or

macro or of an undefined macro.

The macro is ignored, and its arguments are handled

as if they were a text line.

.It Sy "skipping tbl in -Tman mode"

.Pq mdoc , tbl

An input file contains the

.Ic \&TS

macro.

This message is only generated in

.Fl T Cm man

output mode, where

.Xr tbl 7

input is not supported.

.It Sy "skipping eqn in -Tman mode"

.Pq mdoc , eqn

An input file contains the

.Ic \&EQ

macro.

This message is only generated in

.Fl T Cm man

output mode, where

.Xr eqn 7

input is not supported.

.El

.Ss Bad command line arguments

.Bl -ohang

.It Sy "bad command line argument"

The argument following one of the

.Fl IKMmOTW

command line options is invalid, or a

.Ar file

given as a command line argument cannot be opened.

.It Sy "duplicate command line argument"

The

.Fl I

command line option was specified twice.

.It Sy "option has a superfluous value"

An argument to the

.Fl O

option has a value but does not accept one.

.It Sy "missing option value"

An argument to the

.Fl O

option has no argument but requires one.

.It Sy "bad option value"

An argument to the

.Fl O

.Cm indent

.Cm width

option has an invalid value.

.It Sy "duplicate option value"

The same

.Fl O

option is specified more than once.

.It Sy "no such tag"

The

.Fl O Cm tag

option was specified but the tag was not found in any of the displayed

manual pages.

.It Sy "\-Tmarkdown unsupported for man(7) input"

.Pq man

The

.Fl T Cm markdown

option was specified but an input file uses the

.Xr man 7

language.

No output is produced for that input file.

.El

.Sh SEE ALSO

.Xr apropos 1 ,

CVSweb