[wikka-community] Announcing the release of WikkaWiki 1.3.6

[Brian Koontz]

On Thu, Dec 25, 2014 at 04:22:25AM +0000, David Lee wrote:
> Thank you Brian !
> One task I have had multiple volunteers attempt (then give up - what you get for free labor :)
> is a way of 'Exporting' the wiki to a neutral  semantic structured form.
> ( Docbook would be nice :) but just turning the markdown into structural xml tags of any sort - possibly the intermediate form before HTML generation) would be awesome.
> I had one person get about 90% there using a python script reverse engineering the markdown code ... but got abandoned.

Actually, I love this idea and it's been in the back of my mind for some
time.  I use WW as an authoring tool as well for some courses I've taught
in the past, wrote a basic html formatter to strip out all the extraneous
page formatting code and make a standalone page (with CSS) that could be
saved as a PDF using an external tool.  Sort of kludgy, but it worked fine.

> A "wafer thin" task for your copious spare time :)
> Or maybe a volunteer or two might contribute - I might be able to find some  , myself included, if the task was split up.
> 
> Without that - I face the no-win task of either dual-maintenance of the same content forever, or abandoning wiki and starting over with a more tedious but ultimately more efficient source markup  that can serve up more than one output format;    I doubt I'm alone either .... 

So let's start with a wish list of sorts.  We can do this here, or I can
create an issue on the github tracker.  Maybe we can hash out the ugly
details here and then move it to the tracker once we have some solid ideas
to work with.

I believe the easiest way to approach this would be to simply use the
existing markup formatter as the basis to generate whatever output we want.
I'm not too sure there's a need to create a new markup parsing engine to
accomplish this.  Maybe that's what your volunteers got stuck on?

So, got some ideas for me to work with?  Examples perhaps?  It's been years
since I've looked at DocBook, so I imagine I'll have to ramp up on that.

  --Brian

-- 
Brian Koontz
Wikka Development Team
Systems Support and Random Tasking Dept.