mdocml – mdoc macro compiler

Description

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.

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, XHTML, HTML, PostScript, and PDF. It is a BSD.lv project.

Disambiguation: mdocml is often referred to by its installed binary, mandoc.

Sources

mdocml is in plain-old ANSI C and should build and run on any UNIX system, although makewhatis requires Berkeley Database (this is installed by default on all BSD operating systems). The most current version is @VERSION@, dated @VDATE@. If your system doesn't come with mdocml (see Downstream), run make to compile and make install to install into /usr/local. Note that makewhatis is not yet linked to the build. You must run make makewhatis to build it (it does not install).

Current

Source archive	/snapshots/mdocml.tar.gz (md5)
Online source	cvsweb

Downstream

DragonFly BSD	usr.bin/mandoc
FreeBSD	ports/textproc/mdocml
NetBSD	src/external/bsd/mdocml
OpenBSD	src/usr.bin/mandoc

Historical

Source archive

/snapshots/

Documentation

These manuals are generated automatically and refer to the current snapshot.

mandoc(1)	format and display UNIX manuals (text \| xhtml \| pdf \| postscript)
makewhatis(1)	index UNIX manuals (text \| xhtml \| pdf \| postscript)
mandoc(3)	mandoc macro compiler library (text \| xhtml \| pdf \| postscript)
man(7)	man language reference (text \| xhtml \| pdf \| postscript)
eqn(7)	eqn-mandoc language reference (text \| xhtml \| pdf \| postscript)
mandoc_char(7)	mandoc special characters (text \| xhtml \| pdf \| postscript)
mdoc(7)	mdoc language reference (text \| xhtml \| pdf \| postscript)
roff(7)	roff-mandoc language reference (text \| xhtml \| pdf \| postscript)
tbl(7)	tbl-mandoc language reference (text \| xhtml \| pdf \| postscript)

Contact

Use the mailing lists for bug-reports, patches, questions, etc. (these require subscription). Please check the TODO for known issues before posting. Beyond that, contact Kristaps at kris...@bsd.lv.

disc...@mdocml.bsd.lv	bug-reports, general questions, and announcements (archive)
tec...@mdocml.bsd.lv	patches and system discussions (archive)
sou...@mdocml.bsd.lv	source commit messages (archive)

News

19-05-2011: version 1.11.3

Introduce locale-encoding of output with the -Tlocale output option and Unicode escaped-character input. See mandoc and mandoc_char, respectively, for details. This allows for non-ASCII characters (e.g., \[u5000]) to be rendered in the locale's encoding, if said environment supports wide-character encoding (if it does not, -Tascii is used instead). Locale support can be turned off at compile time by removing -DUSE_WCHAR in the Makefile, in which case -Tlocale is always a synonym for -Tascii.

12-05-2011: version 1.11.2

Corrected some installation issues in version 1.11.1. Further migration to libmandoc. Initial public release (this utility is very much under development) of makewhatis, initially named mandoc-db. This utility produces keyword databases of manual content mandoc-cgi, which features semantic querying of manual content.

04-04-2011: version 1.11.1

The earlier libroff, libmdoc, and libman soup have been merged into a single library, libmandoc, which manages all aspects of parsing real manuals (from line-handling to tbl parsing).

Beyond this structural change, initial eqn functionality is in place. For the time being, this is limited to the recognition of equation blocks; future version of mdocml will expand upon this framework.

As usual, many general fixes and improvements have also occurred. In particular, a great deal of redundancy and superfluous code has been removed with the merging of the backend libraries.

See cvsweb for historical notes.