herold — HTML to DocBook converter
herold [OPTIONS]
The reuse of HTML content in presentation-neutral form is a frequent problem. One possible solution is to convert HTML to DocBook XML, because DocBook is a semantic markup language for documentation, which enables its users to create document content that captures the logical structure of the content. The command line tool herold can be used to convert HTML to DocBook. Because HTML elements are often used not as intended, the possibilities for such a transformation are somewhat limited. herold is part of the dbdoclet suite of tools. For more information visit http://www.dbdoclet.org.
Automatically add an index element at the end of the document.
Decomposes the tables from the HTML code into single paragraphs. This can be useful, if a document contains a lot of tables for formatting reasons.
Specifies the encoding of the generated DocBook XML files.
The root element of the document. Possible values are: book, article, reference, part, chapter or section. The default value for this option is 'article'
The title for the resulting document.
Specifies the HTML input file.
Prints a help page on the console.
Specifies the encoding of the HTML source files, such as ISO-8859-1.
Specifies the DocBook XML destination file.
A profile file with predefined settings.
Enables the verbosity for the console output.
Displays the version of herold.
The details of a transformation is controlled by a profile file. A profile file offers more possibilities to influence the transformation than the command line arguments. The following example shows a typical profile file.
transformation html2docbook;
section HTML {
encoding = "windows-1252";
exclude = [ "//p[starts-with(@class, 'MsoToc')]", "" ];
section-numbering-pattern = "(((\d\.)+)?\d?\.?\p{Z}*).*";
}
section DocBook {
abstract = """<title>Lorem ipsum</title>
<para>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed
do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut
enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris
nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in
reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla
pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in
culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.sed, dolor
amet.</para>""";
add-index = true;
author-email = "me@somewhere.de";
author-firstname = "Michael";
author-surname = "Fuchs";
collapse-protected-space = "true";
copyright-holder = "Ingenieurbüro Michael Fuchs";
copyright-year = "2012";
corporation = "";
create-condition-attribute = false;
create-prolog = true;
create-remap-attribute = false;
create-xref-label = false;
decompose-tables = false;
detect-trapped-br = true;
documentation-id = "doc01";
document-element = "book";
encoding = "UTF-8";
hyphenation-char = "soft-hyphen";
image-data-formats = [ "gif", "base64" ];
image-path = "./figures";
language = "de";
release-info = "Version 3.1";
table-style = "all";
title = "Tutorial";
title-normalize-space = true;
use-absolute-image-path = false;
}
A profile file consists mainly of sections. Sections are used to
group parameters which share the same context. Every section must start
with the keyword section followed by the name of the
section. After the name comes the block of parameters, which is
surrounded by curly braces. Parameters can be of type String, Number,
Boolean or Array. Strings must be framed with double quotes. If the
String contains newlines, use three double quotes instead of one. Arrays
are framed with square brackets. Inside an array, the elements must be
comma separated. Every assignment must be finished by a semicolon. Multi
line comments have the form /* my comment */ , single
line comments look like // my comment\n.
The section HTML defines parameters, which control the loading and parsing of the HTML input data.
The character set used to read the input stream.
Defines an array of xpath expressions. All matches are removed from the HTML DOM tree before transformation.
Normally you want to get rid of the section numbering that comes with the HTML data, because it becomes part of the title text in DocBook. The section numbers will the appear twice in your target media. One from HTML and one from the DocBook XSL processing. The parameter section-numbering-pattern defines a regular expression, which is matched against the beginning of every section title. If it matches, this part is removed.
The text for the abstract element of the info section. If the text is structured with newlines, use three double quotes as delimiters. If the text starts with a "<" character, it is embedded into an abstract element, otherwise the text is embedded into an para element inside of an abstract element. The text will parsed and can contain DocBook elements.
If set to true, an index element is inserted at the end of the DocBook XML.
if set to false, anchor elements doesn't get a xreflabel attribute.
If set to true, tables structures will be ignored. The content of the table cells will be inserted into the DocBook XML as a sequence of paragraphs. This parameter can be useful if your HTML contains tables for formatting purposes. Normally you want to get rid of them, because they tamper the logical structure.
The document element you want to use. Must be one of article, book, part or reference.
The character set which will be used for writing the output file.
An array of image formats. These formats will be inserted as imageobject elements, additionally to the format found in the src attribute of the corresponding img element. The original format is inserted twice with the roles "html" and "fo". The other formats are inserted as "html-<FORMAT>" and "fo-<FORMAT>".
The title of the resulting document. If this parameter is undefined, herold tries to dected the title from the head section of the HTML data.
If you want absolute image paths in the fileref attribute of the imagedata element, set this parameter to true.
Copyright 2001-2012 Michael Fuchs. License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.