[Groff] Converting DocBook tables to tbl(1) markup [was: The case against the case against .EX/.EE & .DS/.DE]

[Michael(tm) Smith]

[apologies for re-posting; wanted to change the subject line to
match the actual subject of the message]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden>, 2006-12-28 09:15 -0500:

> There's a bit of a problem in the other direction, unfortunately.
> Norm Walsh's XML-DocBook stylesheets have a man-markup output mode,
> but it doesn't render tables to TBL markup.  

They do now. I finished adding table support to the DocBook
Project manpages stylesheet in March of last year -- for release
1.69.1 or so of the stylesheets. (The current release that distros
should be packaging is 1.71.1).

It supports conversion of tables with vertical and horizontal
spans, nested tables, table footnotes.

I've made many other improvements to the manpages stylesheet over
the last 18 months or so. If you haven't tried any of the recent
releases, you should definitely take a look.

> Steve Cheng's docbook2man does do that, however.

Yeah, that used to be the main reason for using it rather than
using the DocBook Project manpages stylesheet. But not anymore.
The manpages stylesheet can now do everything that Steve's
docbook2man can do, and quite a bit more. And it does it all using
just XSLT (as with the rest of the DocBook Project stylesheets).
Steve's tools partly rely on Perl and on a special
XML::Handler::SGMLSpl Perl module. All that you need to do DocBook
to man conversion using the manpages stylesheet is just an XSLT
engine and the DocBook Project stylesheets themselves.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael(tm) Smith
http://www.w3.org/People/Smith/