[Foundation-l] Printed on Demand Books from Wikipedia articles

Thu Jul 13 10:45:58 UTC 2006

Hi Robert

Robert Scott Horning wrote:

> I am curious how you plan to compile these books in a format that looks 
> good on paper and not strictly as a web format.  While this can be 
> automated to an extent, I do think there are some issues that come from 
> trying to move content from a web format to a printed page, and not all 
> of these can be completely automated.  
As you have pointed out, an automatic conversion of html (or mediawiki 
markup) into latex can not be automated in a way that the book is 
absolutely perfect.
But right now we are pretty satisfied with the results - even though we 
are still working on improvments of the conversion.
The conversion is done with a parser we developed from scratch - as 
mentioned in a previous post. The mediawiki markup is translated
into an internal representation which then gets transformed to latex (to 
be more precise "context") - this is the hard part. It is slightly easier to
transform the internal representation back to html since some css-style 
information can be maintained.

> As I havn't been able to preview 
> a book yet,
>
>   
I hope you did not encounter any technical problems with the pediapress 
website?

- Volker