Re: docbook-tools-discuss: Re: I'm trying to set up docbook-tools...

[Bill Campbell <bill at celestial dot com>]

On Fri, Jul 07, 2000 at 09:56:40AM -0400, Norman Walsh wrote:
>/ Bill Campbell <bill@celestial.com> was heard to say:
....
>| Another thing I would really like to see are more tools that convert
>| existing input from ?roff, TeX, and similar markup languages into DocBook
>| SGML, because this would make it much easier for those of us who are fluent
>
>A little more discussion about how to convert from procedural markup
>to structural markup is probably in order, but tools to do this are
>very, very hard to write. This is the problem I call "dragging markup
>up hill".  Look at the troff source for an (old) O'Reilly book (I have :-),
>and you'll find that the same troff markup for "italic" is used for
>all the things that are italic in print. (Quelle surprise). But if you
>want to mark those things up semantically, you have to distinguish
>between at least three or four different kinds of italic things which
>is nearly impossible to do accurately.

I understand the difficulties of conversion programs like this, and the
best one can hope for is to convert what exists (i.e. italic, bold, and
other formatting codes) to their lowest common denominator in DocBook.

On the other hand, I have thousands of pages of documentation that I've
written using the -mm, -ms, and -man macros that I would like to convert
with minimal effort.  If someone else had written mm2db, ms2db, man2db,
then I could learn a lot about DocBook by looking at the output of these
commands.  Furthermore, I find it a lot easier to write documentation
initially using a format suitable for the -mm macros than I do going
straight to DB, primarily because this is what I've been doing for the
better part of twenty years (it's also a lot easier to do simple tables in
tbl format than CAL tables :-).

I'm well on my way to having a working program that handles the ?roff input
that I've been writing for years.  It's based on a program I wrote years
ago that takes ?roff input, parses it for preprocessor directives,
(.TS/.TE, .PS, .PE, etc.), assembles a command line that then invokes the
appropriate preprocessors in the correct order, and passes it off to ?roff.
Currently it handles -mm macros fairly well, and by dbtbl preprocessor at
least gets my fairly simple tables into reasonable shape.  I haven't
tackled the pic, eqn, or grap, preprocessors because I rarely use them
myself.  If there are others out there who would like to work on this
project, I welcome input, help -- even Andrew Tridgell's favorite pizza
(with anchovies).

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill@Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Systems, Inc.
UUCP:               camco!bill  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
URL: http://www.celestial.com/

``The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be
properly armed.''
        -- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-188