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

Thu Jul 13 12:05:45 UTC 2006

On 7/13/06, Volker Haas <volker.haas at brainbot.com> wrote:
> 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've mentioned before, I'd love to see a Wikimedia project which
does exactly this.  Then the latex could be edited collaboratively to
make things more "absolutely perfect".  It's nice to see it's at least
somewhat possible, though I'd say the quality of the previews right
now is fairly low.

Anthony