# manpage writer for Docutils

Author:

  Engelbert Gruber

Contact:
  docutils-develop@lists.sourceforge.net
Revision:
  10086
Date:
  2025-04-14
Copyright:
  This document has been placed in the public domain.

This writer generates man pages from reStructuredText. Man pages (short for "manual pages") are the way Unix systems have provided reference material to the user on demand, at the shell prompt or in printed and bound manuals, since 1971. Some GNU projects offer a similar resource with the Texinfo system.

Man pages are usually formatted with a typesetting language and program called troff. man is a macro package for troff. OpenBSD, NetBSD, and some GNU/Linux distributions use an alternative program, mandoc, that does not support any typesetting features that cannot be exercised in a terminal emulator, but supports enough man and troff syntax that it can meet many users' needs. This writer produces a dialect that is supported by both programs.

Historically, the program for formatting on terminals is called nroff. When details of the output device are not important, we can refer to the language and its system as roff.

## Module information

Man pages are organized into numbered sections. A system's intro(1) or man(1) page lists them. For example, section 1 documents user commands, and section 3 presents programming library functions. You will find a "printf" page in both sections; the notations printf(1) and printf(3) distinguish them.

A man page can discuss several topics; for example, the gzip(1) page documents the gzip, gunzip, and zcat commands. A man page's topic list is followed by a summary description containing key words that enable the page to located quickly with the apropos command.

A rST document's title becomes the man page's identifier, and the subtitle its summary description. The title and docinfo populate the the man page's header and footer.

Each man page is organized by a standardized set of section headings; see References. Use additional section headings at your discretion only if the standard set does not serve. Man pages support one level of subsection headings to further organize a section heading's material.

The beginning of a formatted man page might look like this:

    man(1)                   Manual pager utils                   man(1)

    NAME
         man - an interface to the system reference manuals

    SYNOPSIS
         man [-c|-w|-tZT device] [-adhu7V] [-m system[,...]] [-L locale]

It would have a page footer with further information:

    noman 1.2.3                  2021‐02‐08                       man(1)

It could be produced by the following roff input.

    .TH man 1 2021-02-08 "noman 1.2.3" "Manual pager utils"
    .SH NAME
    man \- an interface to the system reference manuals
    .SH SYNOPSIS
    .B man
    .RB [ \-c | \-w | \-tZT
    .IR device ]

We can write rST to produce the foregoing.

    =====
     man
    =====

    --------------------------------------------
    an interface to the system reference manuals
    --------------------------------------------

    :Version: noman 1.2.3
    :Date: 2021-02-08
    :Manual section: 1
    :Manual group: Manual pager utils

    SYNOPSIS
    ========

    ``man`` ``[-c|-w|-tZT device] [-adhu7V] [-m system[,...]] [-L locale]``

The man-db project's own man page, which may be installed as man(1) or gman(1), explains the sectional organization of the manuals (in both senses).

## Configuration

Options can be specified as

- command-line options, or

- configuration settings.

Run rst2man --help to get a list of available options; see Docutils Configuration for details.

Option text-references, macro-references set the way URI-references are typeset in the generated man page.

text-references: is the default (for now). A URI-reference would be

  typeset:

      see Linux Man Page Howto <https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Man-Page/>

macro-references: This results in the usage of man-macros for

  URI-references similar to:

      see
      .UR https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Man-Page/
      Linux Man Page Howto
      .UE

  The actual typesetting is done by man/roff/mandoc.

  In groff 1.23 the macros support OSC8 output, to notify terminals that some text is a link, similar to html <a ref="abc.html">abc</a>, abc.html then wouldn't be visible to the user but the terminal offers opening the standard browser to that URI ... assuming OSC8 is supported.

## Limitations

The "manpage" writer does not support all Docutils Document Tree elements but a subset that is relevant for manual pages.

The output is pure text, images are not included. Instead, the text description in their "alt" attribute is shown.

A warning is given for image elements without "alt" attribute.

The "manpage" writer ignores element attributes specifying a measure.

## Conventions

- Newlines, line breaks, and sentences

  One should try to comply with the troff line break rules after ., ?, and ! punctuation signs in the rST source. Use a new line or two spaces to start a new sentence.

  Avoid line breaks after ., ?, and ! signs that do not end a sentence. You can escape a line break with a backslash. In rST, escaped whitespace is removed, so precede the backslash by a space:

      We recommend the works of E. T. A. \
      Hoffman.

  A man page viewer on a terminal might merge consecutive blank lines, but this is not done on typesetting devices like printers. Check your output with a PostScript or PDF viewer before printing it.

- Filenames are always in italics, except in C language preprocessor inclusions in the SYNOPSIS section. [LMHT] Use:

      .I /usr/include/stdio.h

  and:

      .B #include <stdio.h>

  which would be /usr/include/stdio.h, typesetting C-code is probably better passed on to Pygments.

## References

Consult man pages from section 7: man, man-pages, groff_man and groff_man_style.

[LMHT]

Linux Man Page Howto.