Comments and feedback on the specification are most welcome. Please mark your comments clearly instead of modifying the original text, so that they won't go unnoticed as we implement this feature. I will fold your changes into the document as enhancements and changes are incorporated, or I will post additional questions on the page where clarifications is necessary. Thanks! --KimmoSuominen

PrintedDocuments

I have a requirement to produce documentation in standard company format and also to maintain a print history of each document. These are both good and useful requirements for several reasons:

  1. I must be able to train a new person for a given task without lots of browsing through the Wiki.
  2. I must be able to provide complete documentation of subsystems in printed form.
  3. I don't want any work in progress documents to be considered valid documentation under any circumstances (e.g. during an audit).

My goal is to be able to continue authoring documents with the collaborative Wiki approach, and combine several documents into a printable book. These books can be printed, or more commonly stored as PDF documents on the company intranet site.

My choice of a typesetting tool is LaTeX (or rather LaTeX2e as distributed in teTeX). It should be relatively straightforward to convert Wiki markup into LaTeX markup (as opposed to trying to convert HTML). LaTeX has the ability to number chapters and subsections, as well as to produce a table of contents and/or an index with page number references. Just like HTML, it will fold text nicely across the page without the author having to worry about it.

Requirements for the tool to produce printed documents:

  1. (ran out of time for the night...)

Is there a "hello world in LaTeX", or somesuch that I could take a look at? I don't want the full BNF specification, just something that demonstrates what the overall appearance of LaTeX source is. That'd give me a good feel for how involved it would be to drop a LaTeX parse engine in place of the HTML one. It shouldn't be too awfully difficult. -- ScottMoonen

Note that anything below this is not yet complete!

Now that I've given it a bit more thought (today) I'm thinking it might be better to point wiki2latex at a single page to format. That page could use Transclude to get the desired pages in. Then we'd just need an action on 'Tavi to print out a page as "raw" while still expanding macros.

[WikiToLatex] functionality is now included in the 'Tavi base. See, for example, [1].

But the support seems still a tad buggy. See [2] and [3].

I wish!!

I want to produce printable pdf's from the Wiki content. However I don't see how this can be done without a designed document structure. It might be possible to produce a reasonable document via a "WikiTrail?" (a derived hierarchy) but I predict such an approach would produce rather disjointed documents that may be judged "illogical" by us mere humans. If by "transclude" (refered to above) you are implying that is how we establish a document structure, then yes, I would agree - all you need is:

not everyone understands latex nor has the capability to process then (eg. me, & windows users generally). (oh, and yes I have just discovered [miktex])
This thread/idea has been raised again, and at some time in the future, the textual coding of 'Tavi and the visual presentation will be separated. This allows for extending 'Tavi with a pdf-presentational module, in addition to any existing modules, like html/xml or latex. So hang in there, hopefully it will come within a year or so. --EvenHolen