docbook2X 0.8.7 review

docbook2X is a software package that converts DocBook documents into the GNU Texinfo format and the traditional Unix man page format.

License: MIT/X Consortium License File size: 0K Developer: Steve Cheng

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docbook2X is a software package that converts DocBook documents into the GNU Texinfo format and the traditional Unix man page format.

Notable features include table support for man pages, internationalization support, and easy customization of the output using XSLT. (Easy, because unlike other converters, the docbook2X stylesheets are written in a modular way, and the character escaping and whitespace issues with the man-page and Texinfo formats are encapsulated away from the user.)

What's New in This Release:
Some stylistic improvements were made to the man-pages output. This includes fixing a bug that, in some cases, caused an extra blank line to occur after lists in man pages.
There is a new value utf-8//TRANSLIT for the --encoding option to db2x_manxml and db2x_texixml.
Added -m to utf8trans for modifying (a large number of) files in-place.
Added a section to the documentation discussing conversion performance. There is also a new test script, test/mass/test.pl that can exercise docbook2X by converting many documents at one time, with a focus on achieving the fastest conversion speed.
The documentation has also been improved in several places. Most notably, the docbook2X man page has been split into two much more detailed man pages explaining man-page conversion and Texinfo conversion separately, along with a reference of stylesheet parameters. The documentation has also been re-indexed (finally!) Also, due to an oversight, the last release omitted the stylesheet reference documentation. They are now included again.
Craig Ruff’s patches were not integrated correctly in the last release; this has been fixed.
By popular demand, man-page conversion can also be done with XSLT alone — i.e. no Perl scripts or compiling required, just a XSLT processor. If you want to convert with pure XSLT, invoke the XSLT stylesheet in xslt/backend/db2x_manxml.xsl in lieu of the db2x_manxml Perl script.
Make the xmlcharmap2utf8trans script (convert XSLT 2.0 character maps to character maps in utf8trans format) really work.