M Bianchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, 2006-12-22 20:00 -0500: > I believe that if the effort was done properly, then the content could be > mechanically translated into any of the formats, including long, flat text > files. man -> docBook would imply docBook -> man
As mentioned in recent discussion here, there are a few existing docBook -> man converters. I maintain one of them: The manpages stylesheet that is part of the DocBook Project XSLT stylsheets distribution: http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook http://docbook.sourceforge.net/ That stylesheet has some limitation but is more robust and feature-complete than any of the alternatives. My goal in working on it has been to make it generate reasonable output for any valid DocBook refentry instance that's thrown at it -- and not to expect that authors should need to hobble their source to work around deficiencies in the stylesheet. That means it needs to handle things like tables, footnotes, hyperlinks, and special characters without no-opping on them or just discarding them. So it tries to do the right thing and give some reasonable rendering of them (within the limitations of plain-text console display). In the case of tables, it does a great job of converting them to tbl(1) markup (including tables with vertical and horizontal spans). In the case of footnotes and links, it renders markers for them inline and lists their contents at the end of the page in Notes section. In the case of special characters, it has a mechanism for converting them to equivalent *roff escapes (it uses a map that contains something that 800 mappings of characters to their equivalent *roff escapes). It will not be orphaned as long as I'm around. Though I would be happy to hand off maintainence of it to somebody else (hopefully somebody with better XSLT chops and better *roff knowledge than me). It has not really been a great joy to work on it. It's written in XSLT 1.0 -- because the most widely used open-source XSLT engine, libxslt/xsltproc, does not support XSLT 2.0. And libxslt's principal maintainer says that it never will. So it will remain in XSLT 1.0 unless/until an open-source XSLT 2.0 engine appears and gains used in the free-software community (which the one open-source XSLT engine, Saxon 8 -- java-based -- has not) So, anyway, we will going forward have a good DocBook to man mechanism -- with a minimal dependency on just one thing: an XSLT 1.0 engine. libxslt/xsltproc is packaged for every modern distro, so that means that DocBook manpage stylesheet will is usable on very modern distro (and will continue to be going forward). --Mike -- Michael(tm) Smith http://www.w3.org/People/Smith/ _______________________________________________ Groff mailing list Groff@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
