Tool man pages

Man page generation

Man page sections for a command are printed in the order specified by the man value given to Cmdliner.Cmd.info. Unless specified explicitly in the man value the following sections are automatically created and populated for you:

• NAME section.
• SYNOPSIS section.

The various doc documentation strings specified by the command's term arguments get inserted at the end of the documentation section they respectively mention in their docs argument:

1. For commands, see Cmdliner.Cmd.info.
2. For positional arguments, see Cmdliner.Arg.info. Those are listed iff both the docv and doc string is specified by Cmdliner.Arg.info.
3. For optional arguments, see Cmdliner.Arg.info.
4. For exit statuses, see Cmdliner.Cmd.Exit.info.
5. For environment variables, see Cmdliner.Cmd.Env.info.

If a docs section name is mentioned and does not exist in the command's man value, an empty section is created for it, after which the doc strings are inserted, possibly prefixed by boilerplate text (e.g. for Cmdliner.Manpage.s_environment and Cmdliner.Manpage.s_exit_status).

If the created section is:

• standard, it is inserted at the right place in the order specified here, but after a possible non-standard section explicitly specified by the command's man value since the latter get the order number of the last previously specified standard section or the order of Cmdliner.Manpage.s_synopsis if there is no such section.
• non-standard, it is inserted before the Cmdliner.Manpage.s_commands section or the first subsequent existing standard section if it doesn't exist. Taking advantage of this behaviour is discouraged, you should declare manually your non standard section in the command's manual page.

Finally note that the header of empty sections are dropped from the output. This allows you to share section placements among many commands and render them only if something actually gets inserted in it.

Documentation markup language

Manpage blocks and the doc strings of the various info values support the following markup language.

• Markup directives $(i,text) and $(b,text), where text is raw text respectively rendered in italics and bold.
• Outside markup directives, context dependent variables of the form $(var) are substituted by marked up data. For example in a command man page $(iname) is substituted by the command's invocation in bold.
• Characters '$', '(', ')' and '\' can respectively be escaped by \$, \(, \) and \\ . In OCaml strings this will be "\\$", "\\(", "\\)", "\\\\". Escaping '$' and '\' is mandatory everywhere. Escaping ')' is mandatory only in markup directives. Escaping '(' is only here for your symmetric pleasure. Any other sequence of characters starting with a '\' is an illegal character sequence.
• Referring to unknown markup directives or variables will generate errors on standard error during documentation generation.