Flutterby™! : Wiki to PDF? 2005-04-12 14:30:01.112321+00

Wiki to PDF?

2005-04-12 14:30:01.112321+00 by ziffle 4 comments

Need help - we are working on documentation for a web site. It needs to be useful and also I want to be able to print out the docs for a written manual for those of us attracted to paper and three ring binders.

It would be nice if we could collaborate on the docs too, some working on some pages and others other pages.

I was shown Wiki -- and its interesting but I am not finding anything that will allow us to print out the pages in any useful way. Some allow printing to pdf but only one page at a time - now thats useful -- not.

Any ideas?

Ziffle

This brings back memories of the two or three dozen complete sets of encyclopedias in the "Free Book" bin at McKay's Used Books. Print encyclopedias are out of date as fast as you can print them. In fact, CD-ROM based encyclopedias haven't proven much better. The idea of Wiki is that it is constantly under revision. Anything you print is outdated pretty much when you click the print button.

Of course, this creates a nightmare for academic references. If you make a reference to a WikiPedia entry, it is based on the content of the entry at that date. Of course, AMA et al citation guidelines require the access date to be listed.

There's a Python script for Instiki that converts your wiki to Docbook, and Docbook is easily converted to PDF.

FPDF.ORG. - I have used it for generating PDF's on the fly from web sites. Useful to uniquely generate PDF's that will get passed around (price lists, internal docs) that you can track back to the source later.

#Comment I'm working, slowly, on a toolchain made: 2005-04-12 21:06:54.240519+00 by: baylink

that will extract the tree from a MediaWiki starting at a given point, and transform it into DocBook -- which you could then transform into anything you liked.

It will require *some* method of tagging the pages as of a version you like (and which is consistent), and I'm not sure whether that will be done merely with specially formatted edit tags, or a built in field; this stuff sort of interacts with the v1.5 redesign...