Doc Merge - Quoted Line Item Description Field - Turn into Bulleted List

I am working on converting our PDF Manager Quote templates into DocMerge templates.  One area I am having trouble with is the Quoted Line Item Description field. 

Our Quoted Line Item records tend to have long descriptions formatted as a list within the Description text field (each line starting with a dash).  

When using PDF Manager, I was able to take advantage of Smarty modifiers to create a bulleted list which lines up properly.  This is explained in the "Transforming Plain Text Using Markup Language" section of the Sugar Help Doc "Introduction to Smarty Modifiers for Sugar PDF Templates":

https://support.sugarcrm.com/knowledge_base/pdf_management/intro_to_smarty_modifiers/#Transforming_Plain_Text_Using_Markup_Language

The HTML code to accomplish this in PDF Manager is:

<p>Description</p>
{if "\n"|cat:$fields.description|replace:"\n-":"*"=="\n"|cat:$fields.description }
{$fields.description}
{else}
<ul>
<li>{"\n"|cat:$fields.description|replace:"\n-":"</li><li>"}</li>
</ul>
{/if}

Does anyone know if there is a way to accomplish this in DocMerge templates?