OxideBSD
OXDOC(1) General Commands Manual OXDOC(1)

oxdoc — format and check manual pages

oxdoc [-T device] [-O option[,option ...]] [-W level] [file ...]

The oxdoc utility formats manual pages written in the mdoc(7) or man(7) language, with tables (tbl(7)) and equations (eqn(7)), and in the roff(7) requests and escapes that pages use. It reads each file, or the standard input if none is given, and writes the formatted page to the standard output.

The options are as follows:

option
Set output options, separated by commas:
=columns
The line length. The default is the terminal's width, at most 80, less two; or 78 when the output is not a terminal.
Show bold and underline as backspace overstrike (‘c\bc, ‘_\bc’’) rather than as terminal escape sequences, for pagers and col(1).
No bold or underline at all.
=name
The operating system name for a page whose Os macro has no argument.
device
The output device:
Terminal text in UTF-8, the default when the locale names UTF-8.
Terminal text in ASCII, the default otherwise.
No output; report every diagnostic, including style suggestions.
The parsed document tree, for debugging.
level
Report diagnostics at level and above: style, warning (the default), error or unsupp. all is style; stop stops after the first file with a diagnostic at the chosen level.

Bold and underline are shown when the output is a terminal, as SGR escape sequences, and not otherwise.

, LC_CTYPE, LANG
The first of these that is set decides the default device: utf8 if it names UTF-8, ascii otherwise.

0
No diagnostic at warning level or above.
1
At least one such diagnostic.
2
A usage error, or a file could not be read.

Diagnostics have the form

oxdoc: file:line:column: LEVEL: message: detail

man(1), more(1), eqn(7), man(7), mdoc(7), roff(7), tbl(7)

The output follows the formatting of mandoc(1), which the other BSDs use.

The oxdoc utility was written for OxideBSD.

The HTML and Markdown devices are not implemented yet.

September 28, 2026 OxideBSD