md2roff

md2roff converts Markdown to roff source (ms or man formats). This is useful for converting Markdown files to printable PDFs or generating a manpage from a Markdown file.

Prerequisites

• A lex

Building

make
sudo make install

Usage

The wrapper program, md2roff, must take either -ms or -man as an argument. Arguments for md2ms and md2man may be added as well. Input and output files are stdin and stdout by default.

md2roff [-ms|-man] [-t title] [-o outputfile] [args...] [inputfile]

Options

md2ms

md2ms [-bnp] [-t title] [-a author] [-o outputfile] [inputfile]

• -b: Disable page break between the title page and contents.
• -n: Disable display of the current date.
• -t title: Set the document title.
• -a author: Set the document author.
• -o outputfile: Set the output file.

md2man

md2man [-t title] [-o outputfile] [inputfile]

• -t title: Add custom title header (.TH)
• -o outputfile: Set the output file.

Examples

# Convert to postscript
md2roff -ms -t "My File" mymarkdown.md | groff -ms -Tps >myps.ps

# Convert to PDF
md2roff -ms -t "My File" mymarkdown.md | groff -ms -Tpdf >mypdf.pdf

# Convert to manpage
md2roff -man -t 'MYMANPAGE 1 "May 2025" "mymanpage" "User Commands"' mymarkdown.md >mymanpage.1

Bugs

If you find a bug, submit an issue, PR, or email me with a description and/or patch.

License

Copyright (c) 2019-2025 Ben O'Neill ben@oneill.sh. This work is released under the terms of the MIT License. See LICENSE for the license terms.