[pmwiki-users] pmwiki to epub ebooks

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Mon Mar 10 19:44:14 CDT 2014


On 11/03/14 7:58 AM, Oliver Betz wrote:
> John Rankin wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> Is this of interest to others and if so, would anyone like to help test
>> it? In particular, the CSS needs testing and refining with a range of
> ys, I'm alsways looking for an "offline" version of my personal wiki.
Initial results are looking good, given the constraints of epub and 
current epub readers.
>
>> inputs. Testers would need:
>>
>> - time and patience (it's experimental and not as plug-and-play as one
>> would like)
>>
>> - calibre <http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/cli/ebook-convert.html> (it
>> uses the ebook-convert command line capability)
> calibre on the server? I would prefer all the processing on the
> client.
That is an interesting thought. I did it on the server within pmwiki so 
I can generate an epub from any computer with access to the site, and 
store it in the wiki. The epub standard essentially defines a fully 
self-contained web site, stored as a zip archive. I use pmwiki's uploads 
directory to store the epub (and various temporary files).

The way Calibre works presented a few problems, which would need to be 
considered for a client-side solution. For example:

- use php's get function to retrieve all the images and make temporary 
local copies

- modify the html pmwiki generates to reference the relative paths to 
these (Calibre ignores url references)

- get and make a temporary local copy of the css file (you have to pass 
the css path as a parameter)

It would be possible to write a php implementation of epub conversion as 
a pmwiki recipe (replicating Calibre's ebook-convert functionality), but 
this is beyond my capabilities.

How did you envisage a client-side solution would work? For example, the 
recipe could easily generate suitable html, which you could save for 
further local processing. I do this for testing the skin and css anyway.

What for you are the advantages of a client-side solution?

JR

-- 
John Rankin




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list