# Converting LinuxDoc to DocBook

LinuxDoc was a popular SGML DTD for technical documentation that was superseded by DocBook. This package contains a DocBook stylesheet that converts LinuxDoc to DocBook (3.0 or 4.2), and a shell script to drive it. It requires Jade or OpenJade.

   1 Download ld2db.zip ($webfile{ld2db.zip,Zip}), which contains all the other files you need.
   2 Run `ld2db.sh from.sgml to.sgml` on each file to be converted.
   3 Check the file and sort out any remaining problems manually. See below for likely sources of problems.

It's important that each LinuxDoc file starts with `<!DOCTYPE linuxdoc system>`, or it won't be processed properly. This might happen when processing included files one by one.

The `ld2db.sh` script first calls `sgmlnorm` to add in all the missing optional tags (LinuxDoc allows them to be omitted, whereas DocBook doesn't), then calls `jade` to perform the conversion.

Some problems that the script doesn't help with are:

   * Entities are expanded. The [NetBSD](http://www.netbsd.org/) documentation project had to get around this; their Perl scripts might help (if they're available).
   * Comments are removed.