Troff / man pages from Jade

[Brandon Ibach <bibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings...
   Not sure if this has been addressed recently, but a project that
I'm involved with has a desire to integrate documentation which is
currently in man page format into the unified Docbook docs.  However,
we'd need to be able to get man pages back out again.  Is anyone aware
of an effort to produce a troff/groff backend for Jade?  I know it's
on James' list of areas for contribution.
   In the meantime, we thought a reasonable solution would be to use
the SGML backend to produce a document in a "troff DTD", where the
tags correspond directly to troff markup elements.  This output would
then be post-processed by a simple Perl script (or somesuch) which
would produce proper troff.
   So, two questions.  First, does this seem like a reasonable
approach, or is there a more elegant solution?  Second, where might we
find some good mappings of Docbook markup to troff?  I've looked at
the GMAT package, but find two possible problems.  First, it uses the
"three letter macros" in it's mappings, and I was unable to locate
this macro package.  Second, it seems to produce (after processing out
the three letter macros) straight troff, and we'd really need output
which utilizes the man macro package.  Any ideas?
   TIA...

-Brandon :)


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