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transdoc

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mojavelinux

Jun 10, 2015; 7:19am

transdoc

Administrator

I think it might be time to start thinking about creating a meta-converter tool in the Asciidoctor ecosystem that parallels pandoc but centers around AsciiDoc.

Asciidoctor can already convert from AsciiDoc to a myriad of formats, including:

* HTML5

* DocBook 5 (and 4.5)

* PDF

* EPUB3

* man pages

* HTML5-based slideshows

Additional converters from AsciiDoc that are in the works include:

* Leanpub (thanks to Schalk)

* Mallard (thanks to Brian)

* LaTeX (thanks to Jim)

There are also a number of tools in development for converting to AsciiDoc:

* DocBook to AsciiDoc (DocBookRx) - https://github.com/opendevise/docbookrx

* Markdown to AsciiDoc - https://github.com/bodiam/markdown-to-asciidoc

* LaTeX to AsciiDoc - https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-latex

* ODP to AsciiDoc (very alpha) - https://bitbucket.org/kcrimson/odp2asciidoctor

...and there are others I've missed.

What would be cool to have is a unified interface that bundles these together and acts sort of like pandoc for going to and from the AsciiDoc format. I think this belongs in a dedicated project rather than under the main asciidoctor command. The name I propose is transdoc (or perhaps tradoc or traduire).

I think it makes sense to build it for the JVM since the converter needs to have the widest scope possible and the JVM has access to all the parts of the Asciidoctor ecosystem.

pandoc is a great tool, but it lacks what Asciidoctor can bring to the table...a focus on AsciiDoc and an accessible code base.

I'm just putting that idea out there if someone is looking for something to get started on.

Cheers,

-Dan

Dan Allen | http://google.com/profiles/dan.j.allen

maxandersen

Jun 10, 2015; 11:16am

Re: transdoc

not saying this is the full solution but Eclipse WikiText actually has as focus to convert between different wikitext/markdown style languages.

It has Eclipse integration but is not dependent on osgi.

https://wiki.eclipse.org/Mylyn/WikiText

mojavelinux

Jun 10, 2015; 9:03pm

Re: transdoc

Administrator

More possibilities then. More the merrier. Thanks for pointing that out!

-Dan

On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 5:16 AM, maxandersen [via Asciidoctor :: Discussion] <[hidden email]> wrote:

not saying this is the full solution but Eclipse WikiText actually has as focus to convert between different wikitext/markdown style languages.

It has Eclipse integration but is not dependent on osgi.

https://wiki.eclipse.org/Mylyn/WikiText

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NAML

Dan Allen | http://google.com/profiles/dan.j.allen

Ted

Jun 12, 2015; 3:12pm

Re: transdoc

This is an important tool. Once someone makes the decision to move to AsciiDoc, their company will have hundreds of docs that need to be converted.

- Ted @TedAtCIS

Jeremie Bresson

Jun 13, 2015; 8:26am

Re: transdoc

In reply to this post by maxandersen

About Mylyn WikiText:
I had the idea of using it to do the conversion from MediaWiki (used by the eclipse wiki) to Asciidoc.
I have started an AsciidocDocumentBuilder (initially copy pasted from MarkdownDocumentBuilder).
I had other priorities and stopped to work on it.
It could be interesting to finish it, because once you have this class, you can convert from all Mylyn Wikitext input formats (Textile, Tracwiki, MediaWiki, Twiki, Confluence and even simple HTML).

Sidenote: Mylyn WikiText would be much more popular in the java ecosystem if there were distributed on a maven update updatesite (or even better on maven central). [See Bug 421551]

About LaTeX => Asciidoc conversion:
I had also to do a conversion from LaTeX to Asciidoc. Here is my experience:
Because our LaTeX source was homogeneous, I managed to do it with a set of search and replace command.
It works well, and you can also handle the custom commands you can define with LaTeX.

transdoc
Having a good transdoc project sounds complicated, because when you have converted your documents you do not need the project any longer... For me the priorities for the Asciidoctor project are somewhere else...

What a start could be:
You provide a nice (fluent) API to build the Asciidoctor AST and you provide an "Asciidoctor-AST to Text" converter. [Maybe those two features already exist].
Then developers that want to participate in the transdoc project needs to write a parser for their input and a mapper to the Asciidoctor-AST.