[Mediawiki-l] Printing the contents of an entire mediawiki

[Mike Broschinsky]

Well, yes, XHTML is grand, and coupled with good CSS even grander. But
what my boss would really like to do is print the entire wiki, with the
result being a close approximation of what the printed style manual was
like (the paper paradigm is a powerful one).

The old paper copy of the manual ran about a gajillion pages . . .
well, really only about 170.

It's a bit of a struggle really. My boss likes very much the concept of
editing the content on-line; this ensures quick corrections or
modifications as necessary. But he likes, and so do some of our more . .
. mature users the tactile satisfaction of the book.

NSK has suggested Drupal as an alternative. It looks good, and its book
view feature has possibilities.

Another possibility is simply porting the document to DocBook, and
generating (X)HTML to serve on the web, and then using the source to
generate PDF for printing.

*Or* I could just talk my boss into abandoning the paper paradigm . . .
because I *really* like Mediawiki (philosophically; I am no coder by any
stretch of the imagination)

I think these are my alternatives right now, because it appears that
MediaWiki can't print the entire wiki . . . Ooh, ooh, how about an
export to DocBook function? ;)

Mike

>>> baloo at ursine.dyndns.org 01/18/05 7:24 PM >>>
On Tuesday 18 January 2005 10:04 am, Mike Broschinsky wrote:

> We are moving the contents of what has historically been a print 
> manual into a wiki; this is a style manual for regulation writers in

> Utah State Government. Is it possible to print the full contents of 
> the wiki in something approaching book form? My director would like 
> this, if possible.    

Thanks to the miracle of XHTML[1], in at least the monobook skin (and 
probably the others), the printable version of the page is the page 
you're looking at.  If you print it, it's formatted for printing 
instead of what you see on the screen.  See your window system's Print

Preview function for comparison.

Hope this helps.


[1] If we can do it, why can't all those other content management 
systems do it?

-- 
Paul Johnson
baloo at ursine.dyndns.org 
http://ursine.dyndns.org/~baloo/