All man page authoring tools suck so I wrote my own
https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc
Syntax inspired by markdown, ONLY generates man pages, implemented in 581 lines of C, 60K statically linked with musl libc, only dependency is a C99 compiler and a reasonabe subset of POSIX
@emersion @sir this seems to be what you are looking for: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/scdoc/plain/scdoc.1.scd