DOCLIFTER(1) Documentation Tools DOCLIFTER(1)NAMEdoclifter - translate troff requests into DocBook
SYNOPSISdoclifter [-e encoding] [-h hintfile] [-q] [-x] [-v] [-w] [-V]
[-D token=type] [-I path] [-I path] file...
DESCRIPTIONdoclifter translates documents written in troff macros to DocBook.
Structural subsets of the requests in man(7), mdoc(7), ms(7), me(7),
mm(7), and troff(1) are supported.
The translation brings over all the structure of the original document
at section, subsection, and paragraph level. Command and C function
synopses are translated into DocBook markup, not just a verbatim
display. Tables (TBL markup) are translated into DocBook table markup.
PIC diagrams are translated into SVG. Troff-level information that
might have structural implications is preserved in XML comments.
Where possible, font-change macros are translated into structural
markup. doclifter recognizes stereotyped patterns of markup and
content (such as the use of italics in a FILES section to mark
filenames) and lifts them. A means to edit, add, and save semantic
hints about highlighting is supported.
Some cliches are recognized and lifted to structural markup even
without highlighting. Patterns recognized include such things as URLs,
email addresses, man page references, and C program listings.
The tag .in and .ti requests are passed through with complaints. They
indicate presentation-level markup that doclifter cannot translate into
structure; the output will require hand-fixing.
The tag .ta is passed through with a complaint unless the immediarely
following by text lines contains a tab, in which case the following
span of lines containing tabs is lifted to a table.
Under some circumstances, doclifter can even lift formatted manual
pages and the text output produced by lynx(1) from HTML. If it finds no
macros in the input, but does find a NAME section header, it tries to
interpret the plain text as a manual page (skipping boilerplate headers
and footers generated by lynx(1)). Translations produced in this way
will be prone to miss structural features, but this fallback is good
enough for simple man pages.
doclifter does not do a perfect job, merely a surprisingly good one.
Final polish should be applied by a human being capable of recognizing
patterns too subtle for a computer. But doclifter will almost always
produce translations that are good enough to be usable before
hand-hacking.
See the Troubleshooting section for discussion of how to solve document
conversion problems.
OPTIONS
If called without arguments doclifter acts as a filter, translating
troff source input on standard input to DocBook markup on standard
output. If called with arguments, each argument file is translated
separately (but hints are retained, see below); the suffix .xml is
given to the translated output.
-h
Name a file to which information on semantic hints gathered during
analysis should be written.
-D
The -D allows you to post a hint. This may be useful, for example,
if doclifter is mis-parsing a synopsis because it doesn't recognize
a token as a command. This hint is merged after hints in the input
source have been read.
-I
The -I option adds its argument to the include path used when
docfilter searches for inclusions. The include path is initially
just the current directory.
-e
The -e allows you to set the encoding field to be emitted in the
output XML. It defaults to ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1).
-q
Normally, requests that doclifter could not interpret (usually
because they're presentation-level) are passed through to XML
comments in the output. The -q option suppresses this. It also
suppresses listing of macros. Messages about requests that are
unrecognized or cannot be translated go to standard error whatever
the state of this option. This option is intended to reduce clutter
when you believe you have a clean lift of a document and want to
lose the troff legacy.
-x
The -x option requests that doclifter generated DocBook version 5
compatible xml content, rather than its default DocBook version 4.4
output. Inclusions and entities may not be handled correctly with
this switch enabled.
-v
The -v option makes doclifter noisier about what it's doing. This
is mainly useful for debugging.
-w
Enable strict portability checking. Multiple instances of -w
increase the strictness. See the section called “PORTABILITY
CHECKING”.
-V
With this option, the program emits a version message and exits.
TRANSLATION RULES
Overall, you can expect that font changes will be turned into Emphasis
macros with a Remap attribute taken from the troff font name. The basic
font names are R, I, B, U, CW, and SM.
Troff and macro-package special character escapes are mapped into ISO
character entities.
When doclifter encounters a .so directive, it searches for the file. If
it can get read access to the file, and open it, and the file consists
entirely of command lines and comments, then it is included. If any of
these conditions fails, an entity reference for it is generated.
doclifter performs special parsing when it recognizes a display such as
is generated by .DS/.DE. It repeatedly tries to parse first a function
synopsis, and then plain text off what remains in the display. Thus,
most inline C function prototypes will be lifted to structured markup.
Some notes on specific translations:
Man Translation
doclifter does a good job on most man pages, It knows about the
extended UR/UE/UN and URL requests supported under Linux. If any .UR
request is present, it will translate these but not wrap URLs outide
them with Ulink tags. It also knows about the extended .L (literal)
font markup from Bell Labs Version 8, and its friends.
The .TH macro is used to generate a RefMeta section. If present, the
date/source/manual arguments (see man(7)) are wrapped in RefMiscInfo
tag pairs with those class attributes. Note that doclifter does not
change the date.
doclifter performs special parsing when it recognizes a synopsis
section. It repeatedly tries to parse first a function synopsis, then a
command synopsis, and then plain text off what remains in the section.
The following man macros are translated into emphasis tags with a remap
attribute: .B, .I, .L, .BI, .BR, .BL, .IB, .IR, .IL, .RB, .RI, .RL,
.LB, .LI, .LR, .SB, .SM. Some stereotyped patterns involving these
macros are recognized and turned into semantic markup.
The following macros are translated into paragraph breaks: .LP, .PP,
.P, .HP, and the single-argument form of .IP.
The two-argument form of .IP is translated either as a VariableList
(usually) or ItemizedList (if the tag is the troff bullet or square
character).
The following macros are translated semantically: .SH,.SS, .TP, .UR,
.UE, .UN, .IX. A .UN call just before .SH or .SS sets the ID for the
new section.
The \*R, \*(Tm, \*(lq, and \*(rq symbols are translated.
The following (purely presentation-level) macros are ignored: .PD,.DT.
The .RS/.RE macros are translated differently depending on whether or
not they precede list markup. When .RS occurs just before .TP or .IP
the result is nested lists. Otherwise, the .RS/.RE pair is translated
into a Blockquote tag-pair.
.DS/.DE is not part of the documented man macro set, but is recognized
because it shows up with some frequency on legacy man pages from older
Unixes.
Certain extension macros originally defined under Ultrix are translated
structurally, including those that occasionally show up on the manual
pages of Linux and other open-source Unixes. .EX/.EE (and the synonyms
.Ex/.Ee), .Ds/.De, .NT/.NE, .PN, and .MS are translated structurally.
The following extension macros used by the X distribution are also
recognized and translated structurally: .FD, .FN, .IN, .ZN, .hN, and
.C{/.C}The .TA and .IN requests are ignored.
When the man macros are active, any .Pp macro definition containing the
request .PP will be ignored. and all instances of .Pp replaced with
.PP. Similarly, .Tp will be replaced with .TP. This is the least
painful way to deal with some frequently-encountered stereotyped
wrapper definitions that would otherwise cause serious interpretation
problems
Known problem areas with man translation:
· Weird uses of .TP. These will sometime generate invalid XML and
sometimes result in a FIXME comment in the generated XML (a warning
message will also go to standard error).
· It is debatable how the man macros .HP and .IP without tag should
be translated. We treat them as an ordinary paragraph break. We
could visually simulate a hanging paragraph with list markup, but
this would not be a structural translation.
Pod2man Translation
doclifter recognizes the extension macros produced by pod2man (.Sh,
.Sp, .Ip, .Vb, .Ve) and translates them structurally.
The results of lifting pages produced by pod2man should be checked
carefully by eyeball, especially the rendering of command and function
synopses. Pod2man generates rather perverse markup; doclifter's
struggle to untangle it is sometimes in vain.
If possible, generate your DocBook from the POD sources. There is a
pod2docbook module on CPAN that does this.
Tkman Translation
doclifter recognizes the extension macros used by the Tcl/Tk
documentation system: .AP, .AS, .BS, .BE, .CS, .CE, .DS, .DE, .SO, .SE,
.UL, .VS, .VE. The .AP, .CS, .CE, .SO, .SE, .UL, .QW and .PQ macros are
translated structurally.
Mandoc Translation
doclifter should be able to do an excellent job on most mdoc(7) pages,
because this macro package expresses a lot of semantic structure.
Known problems with mandoc translation: All .Bd/.Ed display blocks are
translated as LiteralLayout tag pairs .
Ms Translation
doclifter does a good job on most ms pages. One weak spot to watch out
for is the generation of Author and Affiliation tags. The heuristics
used to mine this information out of the .AU section work for authors
who format their names in the way usual for English (e.g. "M. E. Lesk",
"Eric S. Raymond") but are quite brittle.
For a document to be recognized as containing ms markup, it must have
the extension .ms. This avoids problems with false positives.
The .TL, .AU, .AI, and .AE macros turn into article metainformation in
the expected way. The .PP, .LP, .SH, and .NH macros turn into paragraph
and section structure. The tagged form of .IP is translated either as a
VariableList (usually) or ItemizedList (if the tag is the troff bullet
or square character); the untagged version is treated as an ordinary
paragraph break.
The .DS/.DE pair is translated to a LiteralLayout tag pair . The
.FS/.FE pair is translated to a Footnote tag pair. The .QP/.QS/.QE
requests define BlockQuotes.
The .UL font change is mapped to U. .SM and .LG become numeric plus or
minus size steps suffixed to the Remap attribute.
The .B1 and .B2 box macros are translated to a Sidebar tag pair.
All macros relating to page footers, multicolumn mode, and keeps are
ignored (.ND, .DA, .1C, .2C, .MC, .BX, .KS, .KE, .KF). The .R, .RS, and
.RE macros are ignored as well.
Me Translation
Translation of me documents tends to produce crude results that need a
lot of hand-hacking. The format has little usable structure, and
documents written in it tend to use a lot of low-level troff macros;
both these properties tend to confuse doclifter.
For a document to be recognized as containing me markup, it must have
the extension .me. This avoids problems with false positives.
The following macros are translated into paragraph breaks: .lp, .pp.
The .ip macro is translated into a VariableList. The .bp macro is
translated into an ItemizedList. The .np macro is translated into an
OrderedList.
The b, i, and r fonts are mapped to emphasis tags with B, I, and R
Remap attributes. The .rb ("real bold") font is treated the same as .b.
.q(/.q) is translated structurally .
Most other requests are ignored.
Mm Translation
Memorandum Macros documents translate well, as these macros carry a lot
of structural information. The translation rules are tuned for
Memorandum or Released Paper styles; information associated with
external-letter style will be preserved in comments.
For a document to be recognized as containing mm markup, it must have
the extension .mm. This avoids problems with false positives.
The following highlight macros are translated int Emphasis tags: .B,
.I, .R, .BI, .BR, .IB, .IR, .RB, .RI.
The following macros are structurally translated: .AE, .AF, .AL, .RL,
.APP, .APPSK, .AS, .AT, .AU, .B1, .B2, .BE, .BL, .ML, .BS, .BVL, .VL,
.DE, .DL.DS, .FE, .FS, .H, .HU, .IA, .IE, .IND, .LB, .LC, .LE, .LI, .P,
.RF, .SM, .TL, .VERBOFF, .VERBON, .WA, .WE.
The following macros are ignored:
.)E, .1C, .2C, .AST, .AV, .AVL, .COVER, .COVEND, .EF, .EH, .EDP,
.EPIC, .FC, .FD, .HC, .HM, .GETR, .GETST, .HM, .INITI, .INITR, .INDP,
.ISODATE, .MT, .NS, .ND, .OF, .OH, .OP, .PGFORM, .PGNH, .PE, .PF, .PH,
.RP, .S, .SA, .SP, .SG, .SK, .TAB, .TB, .TC, .VM, .WC.
The following macros generate warnings: .EC, .EX, .FG, .GETHN, .GETPN,
.GETR, .GETST, .LT, .LD, .LO, .MOVE, .MULB, .MULN, .MULE, .NCOL, .nP,
.PIC, .RD, .RS, .RE, .SETR
.BS/.BE and .IA/.IE pairs are passed through. The text inside them may
need to be deleted or moved.
The mark argument of .ML is ignored; the following list id formatted as
a normal ItemizedList.
The contents of .DS/.DE or .DF/.DE gets turned into a Screen display.
Arguments controlling presentation-level formatting are ignored.
Mwww Translation
The mwww macros are an extension to the man macros supported by
groff(1) for producing web pages.
The URL, FTP, MAILTO, FTP, IMAGE, TAG tags are translated structurally.
The HTMLINDEX, BODYCOLOR, BACKGROUND, HTML, and LINE tags are ignored.
TBL Translation
All structural features of TBL tables are translated, including both
horizontal and vertical spanning with ‘s’ and ‘^’. The ‘l’, ‘r’, and
‘c’ formats are supported; the ‘n’ column format is rendered as ‘r’.
Line continuations with T{ and T} are handled correctly. So is .TH.
The expand, box, doublebox, allbox, center, left, and right options are
supported. The GNU synonyms frame and doubleframe are also recognized.
But the distinction between single and double rules and boxes is lost.
Table continuations (.T&) are not supported.
If the first nonempty line of text immediately before a table is
boldfaced, it is interpreted as a title for the table and the table is
generated using a table and title. Otherwise the table is translated
with informaltable.
Most other presentation-level TBL commands are ignored. The ‘b’ format
qualifier is processed, but point size and width qualifiers are not.
Pic Translation
PIC sections are translated to SVG. doclifter calls out to pic2plot(1)
to accomplish this; you must have that utility installed for PIC
translation to work.
Eqn Translation
EQN sections are filtered into embedded MathML with eqn -TMathML if
possible, otherwise passed through enclosed in LiteralLayout tags.
After a delim statement has been seen, inline eqn delimiters are
translated into an XML processing instruction. Exception: inline eqn
equations consisting of a single character are translated to an
Emphasis with a Role attribute of eqn.
Troff Translation
The troff translation is meant only to support interpretation of the
macro sets. It is not useful standalone.
The .nf and .fi macros are interpreted as literal-layout boundaries.
Calls to the .so macro either cause inclusion or are translated into
XML entity inclusions (see above). Calls to the .ul and .cu macros
cause following lines to be wrapped in an Emphasis tag with a Remap
attribute of "U". Calls to .ft generate corresponding start or end
emphasis tags. Calls to .tr cause character translation on output.
Calls to .bp generate a BeginPage tag (in paragraphed text only). Calls
to .sp generate a paragraph break (in paragraphed text only). Calls to
.ti wrap the following line in a BlockQuote These are the only troff
requests we translate to DocBook. The rest of the troff emulation
exists because macro packages use it internally to expand macros into
elements that might be structural.
Requests relating to macro definitions and strings (.ds, .as, .de, .am,
.rm, .rn, .em) are processed and expanded. The .ig macro is also
processed.
Conditional macros (.if, .ie, .el) are handled. The built-in conditions
o, n, t, e, and c are evaluated as if for nroff on page one of a
document. The m, d, and r troff conditionals are also interpreted.
String comparisons are evaluated by straight textual comparison. All
numeric expressions evaluate to true.
The extended groff requests cc, c2, ab, als, do, nop, and return and
shift are interpreted. Its .PSPIC extension is translated into a
MediaObject.
The .tm macro writes its arguments to standard error (with -t). The .pm
macro reports on defined macros and strings. These facilities may aid
in debugging your translation.
Some troff escape sequences are lifted:
1. The \e and \\ escapes become a bare backslash, \. a period, and \-
a bare dash.
2. The troff escapes \^, \`, \' \&, \0, and \| are lifted to
equivalent ISO special spacing characters.
3. A \ followed by space is translated to an ISO non-breaking space
entity.
4. A \~ is also translated to an ISO non-breaking space entity;
properly this should be a space that can't be used for a linebreak
but stretches like ordinary whitepace during line adjustment, but
there is no ISO or Unicode entity for that.
5. The \u and \d half-line motion vertical motion escapes, when
paired, become Superscript or Subscript tags.
6. The \c escape is handled as a line continuation. in circumstances
where that matters (e.g. for token-pasting).
7. The \f escape for font changes is translated in various
context-dependent ways. First, doclifter looks for cliches
involving font changes that have semantic meaning, and lifts to a
structural tag. If it can't do that, it generates an Emphasis tag.
8. The \m[] extension is translated into a phrase span with a remap
attribute carrying the color. Note: Stylesheets typically won't
render this!
9. Some uses of the \o request are translated: pairs with a letter
followed by one of the characters ` ' : ^ o ~ are translated to
combining forms with diacriticals acute, grave, umlaut, circumflex,
ring, and tilde respectively if the corresponding Latin-1 or
Latin-2 character exists as an ISO literal.
Other escapes than these will yield warnings or errors.
All other troff requests are ignored but passed through into XML
comments. A few (such as .ce) also trigger a warning message.
PORTABILITY CHECKING
When portability checking is enabled, doclifter emits portability
warnings about markup which it can handle but which will break various
other viewers and interpreters.
1. At level 1, it will warn about constructions that would break
man2html(1), (the C program distributed with Linux man(1), not the
older and much less capable Perl script). A close derivative of
this code is used in GNOME yelp. This should be the minimum level
of portability you aim for, and corresponds to what is recommended
on the groff_man(7) manual page.
2. At level 2, it will warn about constructions that will break
portability back to the Unix classic tools (including long macro
names and glyph references with \[]).
SEMANTIC ANALYSISdoclifter keeps two lists of semantic hints that it picks up from
analyzing source documents (especially from parsing command and
function synopses). The local list includes:
· Names of function formal arguments
· Names of command options
Local hints are used to mark up the individual page from which they are
gathered. The global list includes:
· Names of functions
· Names of commands
· Names of function return types
If doclifter is applied to multiple files, the global list is retained
in memory. You can dump a report of global hints at the end of the run
with the -h option. The format of the hints is as follows:
.\" | mark <phrase> as <markup>
where <phrase> is an item of text and <markup> is the DocBook markup
text it should be wrapped with whenever it appeared either highlighted
or as a word surrounded by whitespace in the source text.
Hints derived from earlier files are also applied to later ones. This
behavior may be useful when lifting collections of documents that apply
to a function or command library. What should be more useful is the
fact that a hints file dumped with -h can be one of the file arguments
to doclifter; the code detects this special case and does not write XML
output for such a file. Thus, a good procedure for lifting a large
library is to generate a hints file with a first run, inspect it to
delete false positives, and use it as the first input to a second run.
It is also possible to include a hints file directly in a troff
sourcefile. This may be useful if you want to enrich the file by stages
before converting to XML.
TROUBLESHOOTINGdoclifter tries to warn about problems that it can can diagnose but not
fix by itself. When it says "look for FIXME", do that in the generated
XML; the markup around that token may be wrong.
Occasionally (less than 2% of the time) doclifter will produce invalid
DocBook markup even from correct troff markup. Usually this results
from strange constructions in the source page, or macro calls that are
beyond the ability of doclifter's macro processor to get right. Here
are some things to watch for, and how to fix them:
Malformed command synopses.
If you get a message that says "command synopsis parse failed", try
rewriting the synopsis in your manual page source. The most common
cause of failure is unbalanced [] groupings, a bug that can be very
difficult to notice by eyeball. To assist with this, the error message
includes a token number in parentheses indicating on which token the
parse failed.
For more information, use the -v option. This will trigger a dump
telling you what the command synopsis looked like after preprocessing,
and indicate on which token the parse failed (both with a token number
and a caret sign inserted in the dump of the synopsis tokens). Try
rewriting the synopsis in your manual page source. The most common
cause of failure is unbalanced [] groupings, a bug that can be very
difficult to notice by eyeball. To assist with this, the error token
dump tries to insert ‘$’ at the point of the last nesting-depth
increase, but the code that does this is failure-prone.
Confusing macro calls.
Some manual page authors replace standard requests (like .PP, .SH and
.TP) with versions that do different things in nroff and troff
environments. While doclifter tries to cope and usually does a good
job, the quirks of [nt]roff are legion and confusing macro calls
sometimes lead to bad XML being generated. A common symptom of such
problems is unclosed Emphasis tags.
Malformed list syntax.
The manual-page parser can be confused by .TP constructs that have
header tags but no following body. If the XML produced doesn't
validate, and the problem seems to be a misplaced listitem tag, try
using the verbose (-v) option. This will enable line-numbered warnings
that may help you zero in on the problem.
Section nesting problems with SS.
The message "possible section nesting error" means that the program has
seen two adjacent subsection headers. In man pages, subsections don't
have a depth argument, so doclifter cannot be certain how subsections
should be nested. Any subsection heading between the indicated line and
the beginning of the next top-level section might be wrong and require
correcting by hand.
Bad output with no doclifter error message
If you're translating a page that uses user-defined macros, and
doclifter fails to complain about it but you get bad output, the first
thing to do is simplify or eliminate the user-defined macros. Replace
them with stock requests where possible.
IMPROVING TRANSLATION QUALITY
There are a few constructions that are a good idea to check by hand
after lifting a page.
Look near the BlockQuote tags. The troff temporary indent request (.ti)
is translated into a BlockQuote wrapper around the following line.
Sometimes LiteralLayout or ProgramListing would be a better
translation, but doclifter has no way to know this.
It is not possible to unambiguously detect candidates for wrapping in a
DocBook option tag in running text. If you care, you'll have to check
for these and fix them by hand.
BUGS AND LIMITATIONS
About 3% of man pages will either make this program throw error status
1 or generate invalid XML. In almost all such cases the misbehavior is
triggered by markup bugs in the source that are too severe to be coped
with.
Equation number arguments of EQN calls are ignored.
The function-synopsis parser is crude (it's not a compiler) and prone
to errors. Function-synopsis markup should be checked carefully by a
human.
If a man page has both paragraphed text in a Synopsis section and also
a body section before the Synopis section, bad things will happen.
Running text (e.g., explanatory notes) at the end of a Synopsis section
cannot reliably be distinguished from synopsis-syntax markup. (This
problem is AI-complete.)
Some firewalls put in to cope with common malformations in troff code
mean that the tail end of a span between two \f{B,I,U,(CW} or .ft
highlight changes may not be completely covered by corresponding
Emphasis macros if (for example) the span crosses a boundary between
filled and unfilled (.nf/.fi) text.
The treatment of conditionals relies on the assumption that conditional
macros never generate structural or font-highlight markup that differs
between the if and else branches. This appears to be true of all the
standard macro packages, but if you roll any of your own macros you're
on your own.
Macro definitions in a manual page NAME section are not interpreted.
Uses of \c for line continuation sometimes are not translated, leaving
the \c in the output XML. The program will print a warning when this
occurs.
It is not possible to unambiguously detect candidates for wrapping in a
DocBook option tag in running text. If you care, you'll have to check
for these and fix them by hand.
The line numbers in doclifter error messages are unreliable in the
presence of .EQ/.EN, .PS/.PE, and quantum fluctuations.
OLD MACRO SETS
There is a conflict between Berkeley ms's documented .P1
print-header-on-page request and an undocumented Bell Labs use for
displayed program and equation listings. The ms translator uses the
Bell Labs interpretation when .P2 is present in the document, and
otherwise ignores the request.
RETURN VALUES
On successful completion, the program returns status 0. It returns 1 if
some file or standard input could not be translated. It returns 2 if
one of the input sources was a .so inclusion. It returns 3 if there is
an error in reading or writing files. It returns 4 to indicate an
internal error. It returns 5 when aborted by a keyboard interrupt.
Note that a zero return does not guarantee that the output is valid
DocBook. It will almost always (as in, more than 98% of cases) be
syntactically valid XML, but in some rare cases fixups by hand may be
necessary to meet the semantics of the DocBook DTD. Validation problems
are most likely to occur with complicated list markup.
REQUIREMENTS
The pic2plot(1) utility must be installed in order to translate PIC
diagrams to SVG.
SEE ALSOman(7), mdoc(7), ms(7), me(7), mm(7), mwww(7), troff(1).
AUTHOR
Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
There is a project web page at http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/.
doclifter 06/03/2014 DOCLIFTER(1)
