docbook export from Mediawiki (was: Re: Using gnome-doc-utils for help files)

Christian Stimming stimming at tuhh.de
Fri Jul 6 04:38:22 EDT 2007


Quoting Pierre-Antoine <pa.lacaze at gmail.com>:
>>>> I'm beginning the French translation of Gnucash's help, and have been
>>>> suggested that it would be a good move to look into converting
>>>> gnucash-help to gnome-doc-utils [1].
>>
>> Without having looked too much into g-d-u details I'd *strongly* adverse
>> moving our user documentation to po files! Po files are great for smaller
>> chunks of translations which can be translated more or less independent from
>> one another.
>
> I suspected so, and pot files indeed look scary and unusable.
>
> Does someone know a good way of handling big doc translation in a
> collaborative fashion, without resorting to hard to use tools ? I know
> of a wiki engine capable of editing docbooks, or exporting to docbooks.

I think wiki editing and exporting to docbook would be a very good  
solution, because for collaborative document editing the wiki is just  
fine, whereas docbook as export format would give you the opportunity  
to create any further formats that might be needed.

However, every now and then as I was looking into the export function  
of mediawiki (Mediawiki-to-docbook export) it turns out there still  
isn't an easy and error-free solution to do this. For example, there  
is http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/wiki2xml/w2x.php but on Docbook  
export (and OpenOffice.org export) the quoted code fragments (Lines  
starting with whitespace, or "<tt>" markup) sometimes silently  
disappear, which is not tolerable for actual documentation editing.

If anyone can point us to an actually *working* implementation of  
Mediawiki-export-to-docbook, we'd be happy to provide the necessary  
Mediawiki infrastructure and set up the conversion from our wiki to  
the gnucash-docs package. But so far I can't see a solution that  
really works.

For the record, here are further (partially dead) projects about exporting:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wiki2LaTeX
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Open_Office_Export
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Export
And the above mentioned,  
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/wiki2xml/w2x.php with its SVN repo  
http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/wiki2xml/

Regards,

Christian



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