Converting troff tables to ASCII
One particularly useful piece of information I've been wanting to add to the Upstart Cookbook for a while now is the upstart-events(7) manual page. This page shows a summary of the "well-known" Upstart events that are provided on an Ubuntu system. However, as show in the link, formatting this data is tricky due to the number and complexity of the tables. I wondered about converting the troff source to some other format (maybe DocBook) and using that source to generate both the man page and the same data in a format suitable for inclusion in the Upstart Cookbook. However, DocBook seemed a bit heavy weight and I'm not convinced it could handle it (tell me if I'm wrong!) My preference actually is to keep the source as troff since: troff+tbl is a very rich language which provides a lot of control. I want full control over the width of the tables The man page may look a little "cramped". I could have padded it out and made it a little easier ...