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; 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. It is a BSD.lv project.

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

Note: mdocml provides binaries for preconv, apropos and whatis. These binary names are conflicting with existing names. preconv has been renamed to mdpreconv. The other commands creating or using the database (mdocdb, apropos, whatis and man.cgi) are not installed.