[Foundation-l] Printed on Demand Books from Wikipedia articles

[Shlomi Fish]

On Thursday 13 July 2006 16:15, Magnus Manske wrote:
> Anthony schrieb:
> > On 7/13/06, Volker Haas <volker.haas at 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 at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

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