Manual Documentation.pdf

Key requirements for good documentation include being correct, complete, concise, and easy to find and access. The user experience of manuals can be improved by making them more useful, with features such as semantic searching and uniform display markup.

The mandoc toolbox provides a single tool for finding, formatting, and displaying manuals, with a unified and simple user interface. The mdoc(7) markup language is easy to write, read, and diff, and supports semantic markup and various output formats.

The classic roff markup syntax has been in use for over 50 years, with its concept of text and macro lines still in use today. The mdoc(7) language has considerable expressive power for semantic markup and works well as a standalone language, with advantages including uniform appearance, ease of reading and writing, and portability.

Sample mdoc(7) source code demonstrates the language's syntax and usage, with features such as semantic annotations and uniform presentation. The mandoc(1) tool is the reference implementation for parsing and formatting mdoc(7) documents, with compatibility with other implementations described in the COMPATIBILITY section.

Overall, the goal is to make manuals more useful by improving the user experience, providing a simple and unified tool for working with manuals, and using a markup language that supports semantic markup and various output formats.