[cc-community] no wiki-BOOK software?

Rob Myers rob at robmyers.org
Wed Jun 28 16:30:43 EDT 2006


On 28 Jun 2006, at 19:20, Greg London wrote:

> OK, I appear to have lost the OpenOffice
> document for my perl book Impatient Perl.
> All I can find is an HTML file and a PDF.

Well if you'd released the source.... ;-)

> I was thinking rather than doing the work
> to recreate the OpenOffice file, that instead
> I would do the work needed to convert the
> book to some sort of web-accesible user
> interface (such as a wiki) that can create
> a PDF (I need a PDF to make the paperback).
>
> Is there no such fricken tool to do this?

There was a wiki->PDF tool at SourceForge but it's suffering form  
bitrot.

> One problem is that I've been looking at the
> way wiki's generally work is that they have
> pages that are totally unrelated to each other.
> There is no way to create a sequence of
> pages, or even better, create several different
> sequences of articles.

You can create categories to express sequences. Look at the  
"Intellectual Property Law" index at the top right of the copyright  
article here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright

> Imagine you've got wikipedia and all the
> articles it contains. Then say you want to
> create a meta-article of sorts that chains
> several articles together talking about some
> specific topic, say, The Simpsons. You
> could also create another meta-article that
> chains together other articles about
> animation.

There aren't forward and back buttons here, but here's a page in the  
season one guide to The Simpsons at Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_the_General

Notice the episode index at the side of the page.

> I'd like to cut my perl book into a number
> of really small wiki articles. So that one article
> might be about some specific topic, such as
> hex to decimal to binar conversion. That way,
> if you're looking for a specific answer, you
> get a single page with that answer.

Kewl.

> But I also want to be able to string together
> articles in sequence and create a book.
> And this would be part of the wiki. The idea
> would then be that you coudl allow different
> people to create different versions of books
> using the same articles as a basis, and the
> whole thing would still be defined through the
> wiki.
>
> I could create my version of the perl book,
> but someone else could then easily create
> a different version of the book on the same wiki
> without modifying my book.
>
> The other bit is that I need to be able to stitch
> the articles together as a book and generate
> a formatted PDF. I need a PDF to send to the
> printer to create an actual paperback.

You might like to ask Benkler how he did the "Wealth of Networks" wiki:

http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php? 
title=Table_of_Contents

> Does anything like this exist?

You could write it and document it using itself as a book project. ;-)

If you can get the wiki code from the pages it would be a simple Perl  
script to convert it to LaTeX, which could be rendered to PDF. If you  
can only convert a page at a time you can use one of the commandline  
PDF tools to stitch the pages together.

For example:

http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Meta/PDF_to_Wiki

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2005-April/004456.html

- Rob.


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