…and this is how it’s done, the simplest way possible. I initially heard about this technique from Jan-Piet Mens, a large-scale fiddler unlike me, and have fully committed to it.

Write a Markdown file with a manpage structure and a tiny bit of syntactic legalese at the top. I’ll call mine demo.7.md, but I’ve also gone with having it double as a README.md in the past.

% demo(7) | A demo manual page

# Name

**demo** - A demo manual page

# Synopsis

`demo` (No arguments are supported)

# History

Introduced as an example on a random blog post

# See also

* pandoc(1)

Convert to a manual page markup using pandoc(1) and view the manpage:

pandoc --standalone --to man demo.7.md -o demo.7
man -l demo.7

That’s your quick-and-dirty WYSIWYG manual page.

(Update Sep. 29, 2023: Fixed missing “.7” in final man -l invocation.)