Developer Shares Lessons from Building XML-to-Markdown Converter for Turkish Legal Docs

A developer has published insights from building a converter that transforms Turkey's UYAP legal document format from XML to Markdown. The project involved writing a DOM tree walker that maps XML elements like paragraphs, tables, and images to corresponding Markdown syntax. Key challenges included handling overlapping bold and italic spans, detecting headings through heuristics such as font size and alignment since UYAP lacks explicit heading tags, and escaping pipe characters inside table cells. The converter also had to manage character encoding issues, as Turkish legal documents may use Windows-1254 encoding rather than standard UTF-8. The full implementation has been made publicly available on GitHub under the repository udf2md.