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.
+ UNIX manuals.
+ It is small, ISO C, ISC-licensed, and quite fast.
- Why? groff amounts to over 5 MB of source code, most of which is C++ and all of which is GPL. 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
+ The tool set features mandoc,
+ based on the libmandoc validating compiler,
+ 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;
- and mandocdb, for indexing manuals.
- It is a BSD.lv project.
+ mandocdb, for indexing manuals; and
+ apropos, whatis, and
+ man.cgi (via catman) for semantic search of manual content.
+ mdocml 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
+ DragonFly,
+ NetBSD,
+ FreeBSD,
+ Minix 3,
+ and GNU/Linux,
+ as well as all systems running the pkgsrc portable package build system.
+ All of these projects have helped to make mdocml better, by providing feedback and advice,
+ bug reports, and patches.
+
+
Disambiguation: mdocml is often referred to by its installed binary, mandoc.
- mdocml is in plain-old ANSI C and should build and run on any modern system.
- To build and install into /usr/local/, just run make install.
- Be aware: if you have an existing groff installation, this may overwrite its preconv binary.
- The mandocdb utility is not yet linked to the build; please contact
- us if you plan to use it.
+ mdocml is in ISO C99 and should build and run on any modern system; however, you'll need sqlite3 to build apropos (links to whatis),
+ man.cgi, and mandocdb.
+ 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.
- Binary archives consist of pre-compiled binaries, manuals, and other necessary files.
- Universal (Mac OS X) binaries are compiled for the PCC, i386, and x86_64 architectures.
- Windows binaries are compiled with MingW for the 32-bit (i686) and
- 64-bit (x86_64) architectures.
-
-
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!
+ official, so please contact us if you plan on maintaining a downstream version!
@@ -241,7 +252,7 @@
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.
+ this e-mail address">kris...@bsd.lv. Archives are available at Gmane.
@@ -254,7 +265,6 @@
bug-reports, general questions, and announcements
- (archive)
- xx-xx-2011: version 1.11.x
+ xx-xx-2014: version 1.13.0
- For tbl, the horizontal spacing of tables was rewritten completely.
- It is now compatible with groff, both with and without frames and rulers.
- Nesting of indented blocks is now supported in man,
- and several bugs were fixed regarding various kinds of indentation and alignment.
- The page headers in mdoc are now nicer even for very long titles.
- Implementation of a mdoc-to-man-coverter (-Tman) was started.
- This is work in progress and will be developed in the tree.
- The mdoc and man manuals have been made more readable
- by adding MACRO OVERVIEW sections, by moving the gory details of the LANGUAGE SYNTAX to the roff manual,
- and by moving the very technical MACRO SYNTAX sections down to the bottom of the page.
+ The mandocdb tools (mandocdb, apropos (absorbing whatis), and man.cgi) have been re-written to
+ use sqlite3 as a database.
- 02-09-2011: version 1.11.7
+ 31-12-2013: version 1.12.3
- Added demandoc utility for stripping away macros and escapes. This replaces the
- historical deroff utility. Also improved the mdoc and man manuals.
+ In the mdoc(7) SYNOPSIS, line breaks and hanging indentation
+ now work correctly for .Fo/.Fa/.Fc and .Fn blocks.
+ Thanks to Franco Fichtner for doing part of the work.
-
- 16-08-2011: version 1.11.6
+
+ The mdoc(7) .Bk macro got some addititonal bugfixes.
- Handling of tr macro in roff implemented. This makes Perl documentation much more
- readable. Hyphenation is also now enabled in man format documents. Many other general
- improvements have been implemented. Furthermore, a 64-bit Windows binary is now available at mdocml-win64.zip and a Mac OS X universal binary is available at mdocml-macosx.zip.
+ In mdoc(7) macro arguments, double quotes can now be quoted
+ by doubling them, just like in man(7).
+ Thanks to Tsugutomo ENAMI for the patch.
+
+ At the end of man(7) macro lines, end-of-sentence spacing
+ now works. Thanks to Franco Fichtner for the patch.
+
+
+ For backward compatibility, the man(7) parser now supports the
+ man-ext .UR/.UE (uniform resource identifier) block macros.
+
+
+ The man(7) parser now handles closing blocks that are not open
+ more gracefully.
+
+
+ The man(7) parser now ignores blank lines right after .SH and .SS.
+
+
+ In the man(7) formatter, reset indentation when leaving a block,
+ not just when entering the next one.
+
+
+ The roff(7) .nr request now supports incrementing and decrementing
+ number registers and stops parsing the number right before the first non-digit character.
+
+
+ The roff(7) parser now supports the alternative escape sequence
+ syntax \C'uXXXX' for Unicode characters.
+
+
+ The roff(7) parser now parses and ignores the .fam (font family)
+ and .hw (hyphenation points) requests and the \d and \u escape sequences.
+
+
+ The roff(7) manual got a new ESCAPE SEQUENCE REFERENCE.
+
- 24-07-2011: version 1.11.5
+ 05-10-2013: version 1.12.2
- Significant eqn improvements. mdocml can now parse arbitrary eqn input
- (although few GNU extensions are accepted, nor is mixing low-level roff with eqn). See the eqn
- manual for details. For the time being, equations are rendered as simple in-line text. The equation parser satisfies
- the language specified in the Second
- Edition User's Guide.
+ The mdoc(7) to man(7) converter,
+ to be called as mandoc -Tman, is now fully functional.
- This is also the first release featuring a distributed Windows binary, available at /binaries/mdocml-win32.zip.
+ The mandoc(1) utility now supports the -Ios (default operating system)
+ input option, and the -Tutf8 output mode now actually works.
- See cvsweb for
- historical notes.
+ 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.
+
+ Release notes going back to release 1.9.15, February 18, 2010.
+ Briefly explaining the most important changes in each release in relatively easy terms.
+ Very many changes are not mentioned here.
+
+
+ Development history going back to the beginning of the project, November 22, 2008.
+ One-line entries for important commits, releases, merges, hackathons and talks.
+ Makes it easy to find out who did what, and when, and when it became available where.
+ However, this is still incomplete, mentioning only a small fraction of all commits,
+ and to keep the size down, the individual entries are extremely terse and technical.
+ Feel free to look up more details and longer explanations about individual entries
+ in the ChangeLog or in CVS.
+
+
+ CVS ChangeLog going back to the beginning of the project.
+ Very technical information of varying quality, strictly chronological.
+ All commits are mentioned, but some messages neglect to mention some changes.
+ Partly terse, partly detailed and verbose. In any case, the ChangeLog is very long -
+ more than 25,000 lines, more than 700 kB.
+
+
+ CVS web interface, going back to the beginning of the project.
+ Source code, diffs and commit messages for each source file. The real thing.
+
+ mdocml – UNIX manpage compiler, current version @VERSION@ (@VDATE@)