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Comment by opk | Hacker News Reader

Semantic markup has more uses than just consistent presentation. For example, most of the BSD's use mandoc rather than groff for rendering which allows you to do more detailed searches with apropos. Note that the linked article refers to the mdoc macros. These aren't especially new and are very well supported but the man macros are still more common. If you dig into the details, the mdoc macros have many advantages.

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Using mandoc instead of groff is a bit of a step backwards, note.

grotty is capable of ECMA-48:1976 and ISO 8613-6:1994 control sequences, and can actually do proper italicization, boldface, underline, and colour in manual pages; which many terminals nowadays have supported for decades.

* https://jdebp.eu/Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html

mandoc still only knows the old 1960s TTY-37 control sequences that use overstrike for boldface and underline and that have no notion of italicization or colour.

When FreeBSD switched from groff to mandoc, I went looking for any way to have mandoc support ECMA-48:1976 and ISO 8613-6:1994 control sequences. It turned out to be a large amount of work to bring it up to parity with something that the GNU toolchain has had since the 1990s (and is in fact the GNU toolchain's native mode of operation).

> one has to employ the MANROFFOPT environment variable, setting it to "-P-i".

This didn't work for me (Debian unstable), because man called nroff, which doesn't understand the -P option.

So I put

  DEFINE  troff   groff -mandoc -P-i
  DEFINE  nroff   groff -mandoc -P-i

in /etc/manpath.config . This did the trick, but I'm not sure it didn't break something else.

Aha! A typing error. One should set it to

    -- -P-i

Note the -- option. This causes nroff to just pass the -P-i option straight through to groff.

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