doclifter is a command-line software for GNU/Linux operating systems, created for users who want to transcode man, ms, mandoc, me, as well as mm files to the XML-DocBook document format. The application is open source and freely downloadable on any Linux distribution.

The software can be easily described as a small CLI (Command-line Interface) utility that can transcode nroff, troff and groff documentation to DocBook XML (Extensible Markup Language) markup. The software can parse mandoc, man, ms, TkMan, as well as me page sources.

doclifter also features structural analysis for supported documents. It has been designed from the ground up to automatically recognize regular troff-markup cliches. The software requires no installation and runs on any Linux kernel-based operating system, supporting 32 and 64-bit computer platforms.

You can easily used the doclifter program on your distribution. Just download the latest release from either Softpedia or the project’s website (see the homepage link at the end of the article), save it somewhere on your computer, and use your favorite archive manager utility to unpack it.

After successfully extracting the contents of the archive, access the location where you’ve extracted the archive file from a Terminal app (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/doclifter-2.15) and run the ‘doclifter’ command to use the program. Please read the project’s documentation to learn about available command-line options that you can use with doclifter at http://www.catb.org/~esr/doclifter/doclifter.html.

A quick look under the hood of the doclifter application will tell us that it has been written entirely in the Python programming language. doclifter is a cross-platform software that supports GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.