[Bf-docboard] About MediaWiki and DocBook

Sat Aug 20 18:15:33 CEST 2005

Hi Jasper and all,

> By choosing MediaWiki you are limiting the manual to less forms of  
> output.  I mean by this html, pdf, print, etc.

What formats are really needed?  Obviously HTML for the web, and kaito
told me it was PDF for print.

Take a look at this page:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro?action=render
(compare it to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro) ...
it will already output straight HTML for us without all the mediawiki
stuff in the way, and if you take a look at the source of the page, it
outputs it without <body> <head> <html> etc tags that will just get in
our way, so it will be simple to write a script to append all these
pages together into a single large HTML document.

Linux has a very nifty tool to generate a PDF from an HTML file called
htmldoc.  There's many more conversion tools out there.  Converting HTML
to PDF these days is trivial.

Someone pointed out to me that some German wikipedia users already print
and sell content they've created in wikimedia.  The page is in German
but here's a URL with the Google translate tool translating it to
English:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiReader&prev=/search%3Fq%3DWikiReader%2BInternet%26hl%3Den%26hs%3DbP%26lr%3D%26c2coff%3D1%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:unofficial

You can even see they're selling these printed books and booklets at
this URL.

> DocBooks html presentation can be customized by a cascading style  
> sheet, and as you know, used extensively for websites.  I believe  
> this also carries over to print?  All it takes is someone to create  
> this CSS for the Blenders' readers.

Mediawiki also uses CSS for both layout and looks... easily editable
text files... no advantage here...

Is there something I'm missing?  Perhaps I didn't understand what you
were trying to say.

David Millet
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