+ 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.
+ It is small, ISO C, ISC-licensed, and quite fast.
+
+
+ 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;
+ 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 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.
+
+
+ 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, so please contact us if you plan on maintaining a downstream version!
+
+ These manuals are generated automatically and refer to the current release.
+ They are the authoritative documentation for the mdocml system.
+
-
- mdocml is a suite of tools that compile “mdoc”, the roff macro
- package of the BSD manual pages. The mission of mdocml is to deprecate groff, the GNU roff implementation, for
- displaying BSD mdoc pages. groff amounts to over 60 000 lines of GPL C++ source, which is a
- considerable encumbrance to BSD operating system.
-
-
-
- The core of mdocml is the libmdoc library, a validating scanner-parser producing
- intermediate-form output from mdoc input. libmdoc is a simple, fast library operating on memory buffers
- of mdoc input. Its intermediate output, an abstract syntax tree, is fully documented in the mdoc(3) reference manual.
-
-
-
- There are three utilities implementing mdoc(3):
-
-
-
-
mdocterm(1) – formats mdoc input for display on the terminal
-
mdochtml(1) – formats mdoc input as strict HTML (nascent)
-
mdoclint(1) – validates mdoc input
-
mdoctree(1) – prints input abstract syntax tree
-
-
-
- The mdocterm(1) utility is intended to deprecate usage of groff for displaying BSD manuals to the
- terminal, either directly or cached as a “catman” page.
-
-
-
- Please submit patches! Although a significant implementation exists, work
- remains for the backend library and especially the front-end utilities. See the contact information below to submit patches and bug reports.
-
-
-
-
-
-
- INSTALLING SOURCES
-
-
-
- Sources correctly build and install on OpenBSD, NetBSD and Linux operating systems, tested variously on
- i386, AMD64 and Alpha.
-
-
-
- nightly source
-
-
-
- CVS sources are checkedout and snapshotted nightly. These may be found in the /snapshots/ directory.
-
-
-
- % cd /tmp
- % ftp -V -o- http://mdocml.bsd.lv/snapshots/mdocml.tgz | tar -zxf -
- % cd mdocml
- % make
- % make regress
- % make install
-
-
-
- nightly port
-
-
-
- The nightly snapshot is automatically converted into an OpenBSD port (ports for other BSD systems not
- yet available). These may be found in the /ports-openbsd/ directory.
-
-
-
- If installing for the first time:
-
-
-
- % ftp -V -o- http://mdocml.bsd.lv/ports-openbsd/mdocml.tgz | tar -zxf -
- % cd mdocml
- % sudo make
- % sudo make install
-
-
-
- Subsequent installations:
-
-
-
- % sudo pkg_add -r mdocml
-
-
-
-
-
-
- CONTACT
-
-
-
- Please contact Kristaps, kris...@kth.se, with questions, bug reports, patches, and so on.
-
-
-
- If you'd like to submit patches, please contact us beforehand in case larger changes are pending but not
- checked in. If making a bug report, please make sure it's repeatable on the most current snapshot.
-
+ 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.
+
+ 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.
+
+
+ The mdoc(7) .Bk macro got some addititonal bugfixes.
+
+
+ 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.
+
+
+ 05-10-2013: 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.
+
+ 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@)
+