The doclifter program translates documents written in troff macros to DocBook.

Lifting documents from presentation level to semantic level is hard, and
a really good job requires human polishing. This tool aims to do everything
that can be mechanized, and to preserve any troff-level information that might
have structural implications in XML comments.

This tool does most of the hard parts, but not all. TBL tables diagrams are
translated into DocBook table markup and and PIC into SVG, but EQN is not
translated.

Test loads are included in the distribution. The code has been tested in about
the most brutal possible way; it has been run against every single man page
in all sections of a full installation of Red Hat 9 with Fedore Core 1 updates.
It lifts 96% of 9836 pages without requiring any hand-hacking required.