I've been using ronn[1] to write manual pages, since markdown is a lot nicer than raw (g)roff macros. Unfortunately, it has some bugs of its own.

So I wrote my own "preprocessor" [2] (really just a series of regexps) to transform pseudo-Markdown into ronn-style-Markdown, which is then processed into HTML (and from there finally man-compatible roff macros).

It works quite nicely! [3]

In terms of real preprocessing, I use m4 pretty often. I was thinking of writing some kind of m4-based utility for combining different configuration fragments for each of my systems, so that I could have one i3 config.master and a bunch of config.<host> files that would get magically stitched together upon fetch. That's just an idea for the time being, though...

[1]: https://github.com/rtomayko/ronn
[2]: https://github.com/woodruffw/dotfiles/bl...pts/ronnpp
[3]: https://yossarian.net/docs/kbsecret-man/kbsecret.1