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

Thu Jul 13 13:41:09 UTC 2006

On 7/13/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
> 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?
>
Well, the easiest way would unfortunately involve a fork of the
content.  You'd have to pick a particular edition to export to LaTeX,
and then edit it from there.  There would be rules, of course, that no
major changes to the content could be made, and that minor fixes (e.g.
grammatical) would have to be backported, but that's messy.

It'd be nicer if the merging could also be automated, but that's
complicated.  The best solution would probably involve a way to put
the formatting directives directly into the wikitext, but that has its
own problems.

> 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.
>
Yeah, that's basically what I'd see it as, except I'm not sure how
you'd be able to regenerate the page if significant formatting changes
had been made without losing those changes (or performing a manual
merge).

> 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.
>
Well, the first step would be to create the wikitext->LaTeX converter.
 Really I think that alone is a time consuming job, and the rest of
the details can wait for it.  I haven't gotten a look at wiki2xml yet
though.  Maybe it could be easily converted into something like that.

It's nice to see that there's some level of interest.  Being that it's
such a complicated project I'm not sure there's enough yet, though.

Anthony