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

Thu Jul 13 13:03:45 UTC 2006

Anthony wrote:

>On 7/13/06, Volker Haas <volker.haas at brainbot.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>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.
>>
>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
>
While this is something that perhaps should be moved to the tech list, 
I'm curious about what the user interface of something like this ought 
to look like if we did something like this?

MediaWiki software certainly is capable of storing and retrieving raw 
ASCII text, and perhaps we could throw another "tab" that would be an 
editable LaTeX version of the content that could also be "regenerated" 
from the Wiki markup content.  This would be another independent page 
with edit histories, like the talk page.

Other kinds of options might be available, but the user experience would 
have to be smooth and consistant with other aspects of editing Wikimedia 
content.

I like the idea too, and might want to get involved with trying to put 
it together.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning