On 4/20/06, Jesse Martin pathoschild@gmail.com wrote:

I'm considering the creation of a public <format>-to-wikimarkup conversion script hosted on my server. This script would accept input from a user in various formats and output perfectly formatted wiki markup. The specific conversions to wikimarkup I've thought of, in the general order they'd be developed, are HTML, badly formatted wiki markup, Microsoft Word, and plaintext. The input form would probably be similar to that of http://pathos.ca/listips (another tool), albeit better documented and with more options.

The script is intended to surpass other similar tools available in terms of:

• user-friendliness and simplicity of use;
• conformance to Wikisource conventions;
• extended options for experienced users;
• Much greater variety of accepted format on a single page;
• open source code with full documentation;
• open development (suggestions, examples, and code from editors all

welcome).

Everyone is welcome to help find badly-formatted texts on Wikisource and text from various other sources and formats. Users knowledgeable in regex and/or PHP are welcome to help with the coding. The documentation and discussion would probably be located at [[Wikisource:Tools and scripts/WikiMLConvert]].

What? Wikisource has badly marked up texts?!

Actually, this sounds like it will be a wonderful script. When it comes to texts from PG, it's such drudge work to have to format it personally, and not everyone understands bots, either. Having a handy tool which can mark up text documents will be an immensely popular tool. I see HTML and text (usually the two most common sources for texts) as being definitely the most useful, followed next by Word, although I don't use Word to work with source texts.

If I knew how to code, I'd definitely help out with the project, but I guess I'm stuck with only being able to give input and suggestions.

Z