[dokuwiki] Re: Building a book from DokuWiki
- From: Michiel Kamermans <pomax@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2010 11:18:14 -0700
Hi Jason,
That's awesome! Thank you! I would love it if you could share the code.
I've put the scripts up for download at
http://grammar.nihongoresources.com/doku.php?id=technical:details#conversion
- I run the compile process on a windows machine, so the master file is
a .bat but all it really does is pass some command line arguments to the
texate.php script, so making a texate.sh or the like is trivial.
Hopefully the code's readable enough (I am in the habit of commenting my
code as I write it, but of course you always miss bits)
The latest industry trend is to push very expensive XML-based authoring
solutions. These have their place where there is large information reuse, but
they promote the same workflow with fancier tools (and additional labor to add
all of the XML markup). It's a high cost, high
complexity approach that actually limits who can participate in the workflow
and where.
I did a previous incarnation of this book in a modified DocBook 4
(extended to accept ruby markup), with an XSLT to WordML... it was great
at the time, right up to the point where a revision had to be done. Then
you learn how incredibly bad a choice it is for (technical)
documentation that evolves intermittently, rather than continuously. I
can recommend the dokuwiki setup to anyone serious about having an
easily maintainable knowledge base that may require intermittent hard
copy publiication.
My two cents. I would love more discussion around this.
I have nothing but respect for the ODF plugin, but it still generates an
office file, which leaves you stuck with the decisions the office
application makes for you in terms of rendering the data to PDF (which
will be different from install to install). As a typesetting power user,
that simply wasn't good enough for me, which is why I went the TeX
route. However, I suspect ODF will in the majority of cases most
definitely be good enough. The on-page "export" option, in particular,
is a high appeal feature.
I'd love to make my approach more modular so that it slots into a normal
vanilla dokuwiki, but the level of precision it offers also makes the
initial setup -and let me not mince my words- a pain the ass. You either
need to know your TeX inside out, or be prepared to spend a few weeks
(literally) learning how to make it do what you want it to do before you
can set up a preamble that will reproduce that effect every single time.
So if it'd ever become a plugin, it'd be a pretty poweruser/typesetting
perfecetionist one.
- Mike
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