On Thursday 13 July 2006 16:15, Magnus Manske wrote:
Anthony schrieb:
On 7/13/06, Volker Haas volker.haas@brainbot.com wrote:
Hi Robert
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
I am curious how you plan to compile these books in a format that looks good on paper and not strictly as a web format. While this can be automated to an extent, I do think there are some issues that come from trying to move content from a web format to a printed page, and not all of these can be completely automated.
As you have pointed out, an automatic conversion of html (or mediawiki markup) into latex can not be automated in a way that the book is absolutely perfect. But right now we are pretty satisfied with the results - even though we are still working on improvments of the conversion. The conversion is done with a parser we developed from scratch - as mentioned in a previous post. The mediawiki markup is translated into an internal representation which then gets transformed to latex (to be more precise "context") - this is the hard part. It is slightly easier to transform the internal representation back to html since some css-style information can be maintained.
As I've mentioned before, I'd love to see a Wikimedia project which does exactly this. Then the latex could be edited collaboratively to make things more "absolutely perfect". It's nice to see it's at least somewhat possible, though I'd say the quality of the previews right now is fairly low.
My wiki2xml converter is in the subversion repository. It is a set of scripts to convert MediaWiki markup into XML, and from there into other formats, including plain text, HTML, DocBook, and ODT (OpenDocument/OpenOffice format). OpenOffice is also open source and can generate PDFs natively.
Nice. I've been meaning to write something like that. But we also need a way to convert from DocBook/XML to MediaWiki markup.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
--------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish shlomif@iglu.org.il Homepage: http://www.shlomifish.org/
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