Mercurial's documentation is currently kept in ASCIIDOC format, which is a simple plain text format that's easy to read and edit. It's also convertible to a variety of other formats including standard UNIX man page format and HTML. To do this, you'll need to install ASCIIDOC: http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ To generate the man page: asciidoc -d manpage -b docbook hg.1.txt xmlto man hg.1.xml To display: groff -mandoc -Tascii hg.1 | more To create the html page (without stylesheets): asciidoc -b html hg.1.txt