doclifter
The doclifter program translates documents written in troff macros to DocBook.
Lifting documents from presentation level to semantic level is hard, and a really good job requires human polishing. This tool aims to do everything that can be mechanized, and to preserve any troff-level information that might have structural implications in XML comments.
This tool does most of the hard parts, but not all. TBL tables diagrams are translated into DocBook table markup and and PIC into SVG, but EQN is not translated.
Test loads are included in the distribution. The code has been tested in about the most brutal possible way; it has been run against every single man page in all sections of a full Fedore Core installation. It lifts over 95% of these pages without requiring any hand-hacking.
There is a detailed change log in the RPM spec file.
doclifter was written under Python 2.2a1. It will not work under Python 1.5.2, and may not work under 2.1. Upgrade, it will be good for you.
Eric S. Raymond
November 2003