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 (with support for wide-character locales), XHTML, HTML, PostScript, and PDF. It also includes preconv, for recoding multibyte manuals; and mandocdb, for indexing manuals. 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 modern system (mandocdb requires Berkeley Database, installed by default on all BSD UNIX operating systems).

To compile mdocml, run make, then make install to install into /usr/local. 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: you must run make mandocdb to build it (it does not install).

The most current version of mdocml is @VERSION@, dated @VDATE@.

Current

Source archive /snapshots/mdocml.tar.gz (md5)
Online source cvsweb
Win32 (i686) binary archive /binaries/mdocml-win32.zip
Win64 (x86_64) binary archive /binaries/mdocml-win64.zip

Downstream

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

Historical

Source archive /snapshots/
Binary archive /binaries/

Documentation

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

mandoc(1) format and display UNIX manuals (text | xhtml | pdf | postscript)
mandocdb(8) index UNIX manuals (text | xhtml | pdf | postscript)
preconv(1) recode multibyte 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

16-08-2011: version 1.11.6

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, and a 64-bit Windows binary is now available at /binaries/mdocml-win64.zip.

24-07-2011: version 1.11.5

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.

This is also the first release featuring a distributed Windows binary, available at /binaries/mdocml-win32.zip.

12-07-2011: version 1.11.4

Bug-fixes and clean-ups across all systems, especially in mandocdb makewhatis (note: still not connected to the general build and must be compiled with make mandocdb make makewhatis) and the man parser. This release was significantly assisted by participants in OpenBSD's c2k11. Thanks!

See cvsweb for historical notes.

Copyright © 2008–2011 Kristaps Dzonsons, $Date: 2011/08/16 12:13:27 $