Title: Writing an article using mdoc format

	Title: Writing an article using mdoc format
	Author: Solène
	Date: 03 July 2018
	Tags: unix
	Description:

	.Dd July 03, 2018
	.Dt "Test using mandoc"
	I never wrote a man page. I already had to read at the source of a
	man page, but I was barely understand what happened there. As I like
	having fun and discovering new things (people call me a Hipster since
	last days days ;-) ).

	I modified cl-yag (the website generator used for this website) to be
	only produced by mdoc files. The output was not very cool as it has
	too many html items (classes, attributes, tags etc...). The result
	wasn't that bad but it looked like concatenated man pages.

	I actually enjoyed playing with mdoc format (the man page format on
	OpenBSD, I don't know if it's used somewhere else). While it's pretty
	verbose, it allows to separate the formatting from the paragraphs. As
	I'm playing with
	.Ic ed
	editor last days, it is easier to have an article written with small
	pieces of lines rather than a big paragraph including the formatting.

	Finally I succeded at writing a command line which produced an usable
	html output to use it as a converter in cl-yag. Now, I'll be able to
	write my articles in the mdoc format if I want :D (which is fun). The
	convert command is really ugly but it actually works, as you can see
	if you read this.
	.Bd -literal -offset indent
	cat data/%IN \| mandoc -T markdown \| sed -e '1,2d' -e '$d' \|
	multimarkdown -t html -o %OUT
	.Ed

	The trick here was to use markdown as an convert format between mdoc
	to html. As markdown is very weak compared to html (in
	possibilities), it will only use simple tags for formatting the html
	output. The sed command is needed to delete the mandoc output with
	the man page title at the top, and the operating system at the
	bottom.


	By having played with this, writing a man page is less obscure to me
	and I have a new unusual format to use for writing my articles. Maybe
	unusual for this use case, but still very powerful!