About:
doclifter is a tool that transcodes {n,t,g}roff documentation to DocBook XML markup. It parses man, mandoc, ms, me, or TkMan page sources, does structural analysis, and recognizes common troff-markup cliches. The result is usable without further hand-hacking about 95% of the time.

Author:
Eric S. Raymond [contact developer]

Rating:	reset 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
8.33/10.00 (2 votes)

Homepage:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/
Tar/GZ:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/doclifter-2.3.tar.gz
Changelog:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/CHANGES
RPM package:
http://www.catb.org/[..]esr/doclifter/doclifter-2.3-1.noarch.rpm

Trove categories: [change]

[Development Status]		5 - Production/Stable
[Environment]		Console (Text Based)
[Intended Audience]		Developers, End Users/Desktop
[License]		OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
[Operating System]		OS Independent
[Programming Language]		Python
[Topic]		Documentation, Text Processing :: Markup :: SGML, Text Processing :: Markup :: XML

Dependencies: [change]
No dependencies filed

 Branches

Branch	Version	Last release	License	URLs
Default	2.3	25-Dec-2006	GNU General Public License (GPL)

 Comments

[»] Unique and powerful addition to DocBook toolchain
by Michael(tm) Smith - Sep 5th 2002 23:06:59

This is an important addition to the DocBook toolchain. It fills a big need and is unique in that (as far as I know) there are no other tools available -- open-source or proprietary -- for converting man/roff docs to DocBook.

There's some very clever logic in it for making inferences about structure from some of the not-that-explicitly-structured roff markup and turning it into fairly structured DocBook markup. In particular, it can:

* parse command/function synopses and convert them into DocBook markup (using "real" markup like Cmdsynopsis, Arg, Replaceable, etc.)

* recognize things like use of italics in a FILES section to mark filenames, and convert them to correct DocBook markup (e.g., using the Filename element)

* recognize patterns such as URLs, email addresses, man page references, and C program listings, and convert them to correct DocBook markup

The only significant problem I've run into with the 1.0.0 version is in the implementation it uses for dealing with ISO character entities: In some XML instances, it generates internal DTD subsets that include entity declarations which reference the SGML versions of the ISO character-entity sets instead of the XML versions.

A workaround is simply to delete any ISO character entity declarations from doclifter-generated XML documents. The declarations are actually redundant at best, because both the DocBook XML and SGML DTDs already reference the appropriate sets.

But that's a really minor issue, and one that I'm sure Eric will probably have fixed in the next release.

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[»] Re: Unique and powerful addition to DocBook toolchain
by Eric S. Raymond - Sep 18th 2002 01:38:23


> The only significant problem I've run
> into with the
> 1.0.0 version is in the implementation
> it uses for dealing
> with ISO character entities: In some XML
> instances, it
> generates internal DTD subsets that
> include entity
> declarations which reference the SGML
> versions of the ISO
> character-entity sets instead of the XML
> versions.
>
> But that's a really minor issue, and one
> that I'm sure
> Eric will probably have fixed in the
> next release.


Your wish is granted. :-)

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