#481 manpage: please stop converting text to full capitals

[G. Branden Robinson]

mandoc maintainer Ingo Schwarze and I (groff lead developer) reached a consensus a few years ago that man pages should stop shouting. This is a historical artifact of practices at Bell Labs in the 1970s.

It also can, reportedly, create accessibility problems, since a screen reader may pronounce words in FULL CAPS letter by letter instead of reading them as words. (The KDE screen reader I tried with a PDF didn't do this.)

In groff 1.23.0, this behavior is configurable, and the user can turn the full-caps conversion on at rendering time. With man-db, these options can be passed in via the MANROFFOPT environment variable.

     -rCS=1   Set section headings (the argument(s) to .SH) in full
              capitals.  This transformation is off by default because
              it discards case distinction information.

     -rCT=1   Set the man page identifier (the first argument to .TH) in
              full capitals in headers and footers.  This transformation
              is off by default because it discards case distinction
              information.

[engelbert gruber]

sorry mandoc_man had uppercase titles

groff_man is lowercase already ... looks will require some time to
getting used to

[Günter Milde]

The issue is fixed in Docutils 0.22 released 2025-07-29.
Thanks again for reporting.