Jan,
 Thanks for the reply.
  I was concerned that if I wrote osh.1 in mdoc(7), I would need to
generate another man(7) page for systems that don't support mdoc(7), ie
most linuxes. But isn't the point of mandoc -T man to output man(7) from an
mdoc(7) file?t don't
  Or asking another way; what's the most reasonable (workflow) way to write
a man page in mdoc(7), but make man pages available on systems that don't
support mdoc(7) (ie most linuxes)?

 Sorry if I'm being unclear and thanks for your help.



On Fri, Jun 14, 2019 at 4:54 AM Jan Stary <hans@stare.cz> wrote:

> > mdoc(5) is just a format;
>
> I mean mdoc(7), sorry.
>
> > A good start is
> >
> >       $ wc -l /usr/share/man/man1/*.1 | sort -n | less
> >
> > (or wherever your system keeps manpages),
> > pick the shortest one for a program you know and use,
> > and read the (input) manpage, such as
> >
> >       $ vim /usr/share/man/man1/yes.1
>
> I forgot an important thing: on many systems outside of the *BSD family,
> the system manpages will be written in the legacy man(7) format,
> built on top of roff(7), a general purpose typesetting language.
>
> Both man(1) and mandoc(1) can read both; but mdoc(5) ficilitates
> semantic markup ("this is a commandline option"), as opposed to
> low-level formating instructions ("type this in italic").
>
> In case your system uses man(7), not mdoc(7), as e.g. most linuxes do,
> you will have to learn mdoc elsewhere, e.g.
>
>         http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/yes/yes.1
>
> Jan
>
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