This small utility aims to enable easy and quick conversion from DocBook-documents (see http://www.docbook.org) to valid, human readable LaTeX-markup. At the moment, only DocBook XML-documents are supported. The sx (sgml2xml)-utility from James Clark's sp package is recommended for passing this obstacle.
It does only support a very small subset of the DocBook-DTD. The most interesting features are probably:
<markup role="texmath">
<!-- Math markup goes here -->
<markup>
Currently, there are only two known users. Personally, I use it mainly for my master's thesis, but it should also be useful when writing small articles etc. It may also be used when learning the basic features of LaTeX (assuming DocBook is easier to learn than LaTeX, of course :) ).
The TODO-list is so large that it really does not feel tempting to publish it. Some of the more urgent features are:
This documentation is not complete, it should at least include a list of supported elements and a more thorough feature-description (dblup also supports a few simple processing instructions for controlling LaTeX-behavior).
The cause of the project's silly name is that my original project is called "db2latex", but this project already exists (and is an excellent implementation of the same functionality, using XSLT-stylesheets - see http://db2latex.sourceforge.net/). Currently, db2latex supports a much larger subset of DocBook than dblup.
The conceptual difference between these two projects is that the db2latex-project is a collection of XSLT-stylesheets (which can then be processed using an external XSLT-processor, to turn the source document into LaTeX-code), while all the conversion-"templates" in dblup is written in native Perl, and does not need to be processed by an external program.
The rationale is that after spending a considerable amount of time working with XSL, I got tired of it, and started to implement the same functionality using Perl (as a Perl-module). The disadvantage is that this is less flexible and requires knowledge of Perl - the advantage is that it only requires knowledge of Perl, and it is intented to be as simple and fast as possible. Additionally, Perl offers a lot of more advanced functionality not found in XSLT which, at least for me, makes it easier to handle tables etc.
All files can be downloaded from the project-page at Sourceforge
If you think you can use this tool, or want to contribute/extend it, do not hesitate to contact me - it's far easier to motivate further work if I know someone actually needs it. The easiest way is by e-mail: jongr@users.sourceforge.net