Alternatives

man

• Pros: installed everywhere, authoritative rendering, great for interactive reading.
• Cons: terminal-only, no structured output, hard to automate.
• Use when: you are a human reading a man page at a terminal.

groff -Thtml

• Pros: produces HTML from roff source, no extra tools.
• Cons: output is presentation-oriented, not structured; hard to query programmatically.
• Use when: you need a web-rendered copy of a man page.

mandoc -Tmarkdown

• Pros: high-quality Markdown output from mdoc pages.
• Cons: focused on human-readable Markdown, not a structured intermediate; no JSON.
• Use when: you want a Markdown rendering and can install mandoc.

Pandoc

• Pros: can convert many formats, including roff.
• Cons: heavy dependency, not purpose-built for man pages, may not preserve roff/mdoc semantics.
• Use when: you need a general-purpose document converter.

Web APIs

• Pros: can summarize or reformat pages.
• Cons: requires network, API keys, uploading documentation, latency, and cost.
• Use when: you need language translation or summarization beyond conversion.

When to choose roff

Choose roff when you want:

• A small, self-contained binary with no runtime dependencies.
• Structured JSON output for scripts and agents.
• Clean Markdown for documentation pipelines.
• Progressive disclosure for LLM context windows.
• Local, offline conversion without API keys.