enhancing the modern toolbox for the classic documentation formats

Since its first presentation at BSDCan 2011, the mandoc(1) documentation formatting system has gained a lot of traction in all four major BSD operating systems and beyond. This talk will provide an update regarding recent feature additions, in particular the mdoc(7) to man(7) converter to produce high quality manual formatting for portable software packages, and the new SQLite3-based mandocdb(8) utility, a drop-in replacement for the traditional makewhatis(8)/apropos(1) combo, providing markup-sensitive search capabilities and flexible search result output formats.

I will give an overview of the adoption status of mandoc(1) and mandocdb(8) in OpenBSD, DragonFly, NetBSD, and FreeBSD as well as a few other free operating systems, comment on mandoc versus groff usage in the OpenBSD ports tree including recommendations for handling manuals in packaging systems in general, and comment on possible future development directions.