Support for rendering manpages and other Groff files?

[joshtriplett]

Github supports detecting Groff as a language, and finding files written in Groff. I'd love to have support for rendering Groff (and specifically manpages) inline as HTML. That would allow programs and libraries that provide documentation in man form to allow browsing and linking to it directly on github.

[joshtriplett]

One note: while Groff is a very general language, there's a much smaller subset that people use in practice to write manpages, and there's a long history of applications directly implementing just that subset rather than a full Groff typesetter. I don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good here: a renderer that only handles manpages would be incredibly useful.

[TPS]

@joshtriplett: @github's official issue (❗) for this is github/markup#478, but, if you contact @GitHub, it'd be appreciated to post the response here-&-there. ☺ Maybe you'd like to close this in favor of that?

[joshtriplett]

I mailed github support when I posted the issue. The response I got was:

Thanks for your suggestion! I can't promise we'll do it, but I have added it to our list for our team to consider!

[kenorb]

This issue should be closed in favor of github/markup/issues/478.