On Wed, 25 Apr 2007, Clayton wrote:
I've been poking around in the info on the LfL (FOSDEM presentation, mailing list archives etc), and have a question... or two...
From what I've gathered, doc input is all done in DocBook XML (or flat text that is converted to DocBook XML). Output formats for LfL are PDF, HTML and Wiki.
Right. Other formats would be possible by adding the necessary styleheets, which means if docbook supports another format, it will be relatively easy to convert to that format.
Is there any thought or (future) plan to use MediaWiki as an input source?
Has anyone successfully managed to go from MediaWiki source to XML and then on (via Apache FO) to PDF? (the XML to PDF is relatively easy... it's the Wiki to XML that's looking ugly to me).
You are absolutely right. This is one of the weak points with DocBook. There are many export formats, but for the input, it relies on filters provided by the respective other format. One aspect of this conversion is how much information exists in the original format, that may be used in docbook. MediaWiki (and all other wikis I know of) have a very simple format that does not care for syntax but only for layout. You could do wild guesses about how to convert wiki to xml, but you will never be able to convert it in a way that complies with editing standards of DocBook. If you plan to migrate the source of a text from MediaWiki to XML, you might want to have a look at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/wiki2xml/w2x.php (use the option "raw wikitext" when entering MediaWiki input). But this is still no option for us to automate such a process, and thus we will have to stick with DocBook. Berthold -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Berthold Gunreben SUSE Linux GmbH -- Dokumentation mailto:bg@suse.de Maxfeldstr. 5 http://www.suse.de/ D-90409 Nuernberg, Germany SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-doc+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-doc+help@opensuse.org