One thing i do not understand, why bother writing this format directly instead of using some WYSIWYG editor (none exists - that i know of - for manpages specifically, but... why?)? All you need is to have some autoformatting for the output so that diffs in source control (if you care for that) are readable, but beyond that you shouldn't need to care at all about how the source looks for something that is essentially a rich text document - and rich text editors existed since the dawn of personal computing.