WRITING-MDOC(7) Miscellaneous Information Manual WRITING-MDOC(7) NAME Writing mdoc – semantic markup DESCRIPTION I recently learned how to write man pages so that I could document a bunch of little programs I've written. Modern man pages are written in mdoc(7), whose documentation is also available from http://mandoc.bsd.lv. mdoc(7) differs from many other markup languages by providing “semantic markup” rather than just “physical markup.” What this means is that the markup indicates what something is, not how to format it. For example, the ‘Ar’ macro is used to indicate command-line arguments rather than one of the macros for bold, italic or underline. This frees each author of having to choose and enables consistent presentation across different man pages. Another advantage of semantic markup is that information can be extracted from it. For example, makewhatis(8) can easily extract the name and short description from each man page thanks to the ‘Nm’ and ‘Nd’ macros. I use the same information to generate an Atom feed for these documents, though in admittedly a much less robust way than mandoc(1). When it comes to actually writing mdoc(7), it can take some getting used to. The language is of roff(7) lineage so its syntax is very particular. Macros cannot appear inline, but must start on new lines beginning with ‘.’. Sentences should likewise always start on a new line. Since I'm in the habit of writing with semantic line breaks, I actually find these requirements fit in well. The more frustrating syntax limitation to me is the rule against empty lines. Without them, it can be quite difficult to edit a lengthy document. Thankfully, lines with only a ‘.’ on them are allowed, but this still causes visual noise. To alleviate that, I have a vim(1) syntax file for mdoc(7) which conceals the lone dots: if exists("b:current_syntax") finish endif runtime! syntax/nroff.vim unlet! b:current_syntax setlocal sections+=ShSs syntax match mdocBlank /^\.$/ conceal setlocal conceallevel=2 let b:current_syntax = "mdoc" It also adds the mdoc(7) section header and subsection header macros to the sections option to make vim(1)'s { and } motions aware of them. With that, I've found writing man pages pleasant and rewarding. I've started writing other documents with mdoc(7) as well, as you can see here. SEE ALSO Semantic Linefeeds: http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/ AUTHORS june@causal.agency This document is produced from mdoc(7) source available from https://git.causal.agency/src/tree/www/text.causal.agency Causal Agency September 27, 2018 Causal Agency