twiki format to docbook

[Dave Pawson]

The article on xml.com,
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/03/03/sgmlwiki.html provoked me
into trying it out.

I didn't work with SGML for long, and this piece is just a little
on the esoteric side.

The basics are that the wiki text is regular, hence parsable.
SGML has a wierd set of characteristics such that "ldldldl" can
be interpreted as the tag named quote, the content ldldldl and
the end tag for quote. As I said, wierd.
   Similarly,
newline---+ can be interpreted as a level one heading, etc.
Anyway, so far I've got a working version for the twiki syntax
but I'm wondering if its a worthwhile addition to the fedora docs
toolkit?
The only tool is a couple of text files, and an application
from James Clark. Its part of the sp toolkit
http://www.jclark.com/sp/


http://www.jclark.com/sp/sx.htm documents it.

The process is fairly simple.
1. Add two lines to the wiki content,
2. Parse it as an SGML file... using sx, which then produces
an XML file.

Its then two minutes to wrap it up in a proper article header
using XSLT and submit it.

It may lead to the need to keep wiki contents fairly straightforward,
e.g. inter page wiki links or  WikiWord links as twiki calls them,
won't tranfer quite so easily.

If one of the people using the wiki could point out a fairly complex
page I'll try it out and report the results.

regards DaveP
<tag>Old enough to have used SGML :-)</tag>