How can I change from docbook to restructuredText?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

FWIW, I handled this by a combination of manual and automatic conversion. Some simple things I replaced using regex:

ie

s/<emphasis>/**/
s/</emphasis>/**/
s/<code>/``/
s/</code>/``/

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

Answer 3

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

http://code.google.com/p/db2rst/

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.

Answer 4

Pandoc http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/