mwlib was written in conjunction with the WMF, and IIRC had at least some input from Brion Vibber. It's high quality and works well. There is a 2-3 hour learning curve for navigating the python modules and methods using dir and help.
Well, in front of the evidence... "{{lang}}" and "{{formatnum...}}" are not processed... Well, I guess I should stop insisting on that.
IIRC dumpHTML is a maintenance script that is included with mediawiki. I don't believe that it requires you to have images. I have used both of the approaches I described to you in the past, and found them both to be straightforward.
Ok. I have looked closer. I have downloaded "DumpHTML" and tried to execute it with a file containing my "Wikitext" sentence. "DumpHTML" is not OK for me.
See from: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ExtensionDistributor
"The tar archive should be extracted into your extensions directory. For example, on a unix-like OS: tar -xzf DumpHTML-MW1.16-r59064.tar.gz -C /var/www/mediawiki/extensions"
I have no "extensions directory" because I have no "wiki". I have sentences, isolated sentences (actually "Java" "String" objects) which I am manipulating through a "Java" program.
Thanks and all the best, -- Lmhelp