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I have a 30-ish page manual in docbook. However, working with docbook is so painful that I don't really update it. I want to switch to restructedText instead.

I can't find any direct translator (the best I could find is ezComponents, but it fails on the docbook sgml). Maybe there is an indirect route through RTF or some other format, but I can't figure it out.

Any ideas?

PS The current conversion process is:

docbook -> jade -> html
docbook -> jade -> tex -> pdflatex -> pdf

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4 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

I also couldn't find such a converter and I wrote one yesterday:


It's very limited. At this moment it handles only Docbook elements that I have in my docs, and it doesn't translate internal links properly yet. It uses lxml to parse DocBook, I don't know how this would work with SGML, I used it for XML DocBook only.

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Not exactly what I wanted, but I did mine manually anyway. –  Paul Biggar Jul 29 '09 at 12:41
+1 for 'I also couldn't find such a converter and I wrote one yesterday' –  Cheezmeister Apr 28 '12 at 21:06
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FWIW, I handled this by a combination of manual and automatic conversion. Some simple things I replaced using regex:



The rest I did manually, since I wasn't sure it would work automatically. In the end, it probably would have.

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Hey Paul, you can try to use this docbook to OpenDocument converter, it's still in beta but it might work for you.

It would probably be easier to get something in an OpenDocument format to RST.

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I couldn't find a converter from OpenDocument to RST either. –  Paul Biggar May 21 '09 at 9:57
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Pandoc http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

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It doesn't read from docbook. –  Paul Biggar May 10 '10 at 22:30
I'm incredible sorry. I could have sworn it read docbook. It does convert RestructedText to DocBook. I'm not sure if I deserved the -1 for such a mistake. Enhancing Pandoc to read docbook would probably better than a bunch of Reg Expressions. –  Adam Gent May 11 '10 at 1:09
It's nothing personal. Wrong answers need to be downvoted. It would be better still do delete your answer, as it doesn't provide anything useful to people reading this question. –  Paul Biggar Jun 19 '10 at 11:02
I wouldn't say anything useful because now some one else can avoid the same mistake I made. Its also an interesting framework that could serve as the starting point for doing what you want and much more. –  Adam Gent Jun 19 '10 at 16:29
As of version 1.9.3, released today, pandoc does read DocBook. –  John MacFarlane May 13 '12 at 3:22
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