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Ronn

Ronn builds manuals. It converts simple, human readable textfiles to roff for terminal display, and also to HTML for the web.

The source format includes all of Markdown but has a more rigid structure and syntax extensions for features commonly found in manpages (definition lists, link notation, etc.). The ronn-format(7) manual page defines the format in detail.

The *.ronn files found in the man/ directory show off a wide range of ronn capabilities:

As an alternative, you might want to check out pandoc which can also convert markdown into roff manual pages.

Examples

Build roff and HTML output files for one or more input files:

$ ronn man/ronn.5.ronn
roff: man/ronn.5
html: man/ronn.5.html

Generate only a standalone HTML version of one or more files:

$ ronn --html man/markdown.5.ronn
html: man/markdown.5.html

Build roff versions of all ronn files in a directory:

$ ronn --roff man/*.ronn

View a ronn file as if it were a manpage without building intermediate files:

$ ronn --man man/markdown.5.ronn

View roff output with man(1):

$ man man/ronn.5

The ronn(1) manual page includes comprehensive documentation on ronn command line options.

Background

Some think UNIX manual pages are a poor and outdated form of documentation. I disagree:

Unfortunately, figuring out how to create a manpage is a fairly tedious process. The roff/mandoc/mdoc macro languages are highly extensible, fractured between multiple dialects, and include a bunch of device specific stuff irrelevant to modern publishing tools.

Copying

Ronn is Copyright (C) 2010 Ryan Tomayko<br> See the file COPYING for information of licensing and distribution.