[pmwiki-users] convert LaTeX to pmwiki (was: Cookbook:PublishPDF library updated)

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Thu Oct 9 16:29:40 CDT 2008


Hello Vince
On Thursday, 9 October 2008 2:35 PM, Vince Administration <vadmin at math.uconn.edu> wrote:
>John,
>We have a lot of LaTeX documents, and it would be useful to be able  
>to import some of these into
>into wiki pages, and then incorporate the pages into Wikipublisher  
>documents. Does Wikipublisher have
>a provision for LaTeX input?
>
>Thanks, Vince
>
I am re-sending this via the pmwiki list, as my message to your
email address was rejected as spam :-)

> Dear Vince
>
> It is interesting that you ask this question at this time. One of the
> users, Gustav whom I have cc'd, is converting his undergraduate
> research report from LaTeX to Wikipublisher, with impressive results.
>
> I believe he uses a collection of regular expressions to convert
> LaTeX commands into their wiki markup equivalents, but do not
> know the details.
>
> PmWiki has the concept of "replace on save" operations, so that
> potentially, one can copy and paste LaTeX into a wiki edit page
> form and have it automatically convert into wiki markup when
> you press "Save".
>
> Gustav, could you comment? And would it be possible to make
> a Wikipublisher Cookbook recipe that provides a suitable set of
> LaTeX -> wiki "replace on save" patterns? Many people would
> find this useful.
>
> And are you ready to share a URL where Vince can see a working
> version of your results to date?
>
> Kind regards
> John
>

This was Gustav's reply (with an attachment omitted), in case his
reply was also rejected...

<quote>
Indeed I am converting my final year project to Wikipublisher. It is a
complex enough report to really push Wikipublisher to its limits. And
when one of those limits is reached, John is very quick to expand the
capabilities of Wikipublisher so we get an ever more powerful
Wikipublisher.

If you would like to compare before and after, you can go to
http://www.parakoos.com/pmwiki/RetteSichWerKann and generate the
latest version of the Wikipublisher version, and browse the space to
see the web-version. And for the original, please see
http://www.parakoos.com/RSWK/.

As for how I am doing my conversion, well, I am doing the conversion
from Lyx, the program I wrote the report in. It generates LaTeX for
me, but that is not what I am converting from. I am converting from
what I get when I copy and paste the output from Lyx. It would have
been a lot more powerful if I had done the conversion straight from
LaTeX as I could probably have generated code to convert everything
then. Now, there are things that I still have to do manually, such as
bold and italic text.

What I am using is TextPad and a set of regular expression replace
statements. I've attached the ones I am using in case they prove to be
useful.

If the search and replace on save feature of pmwiki is clever enough
to use RE then I guess it could be turned into a cookbook add-on. Once
you get started with these RE they are pretty easy to work with. And
yes, this would be really useful! (The RE would have to be able to
work on more than one line though!)

And finally, the current state of the Wikipublisher version is very
good, but not complete. E.g. I don't have LaTeX installed yet to do
math formulas, and the bibiliography isn't very nicely formatted yet.
And a few other bits and pieces. (such as after chapter 4 I think I
haven't bothered with tracking down and making text bold, italic etc)

I'd be very interested in knowing if you convert any LaTeX documents
to Wikipublisher, so if you do, please let me know. Ultimately I am
going to take this all back to my university to inspire them to start
using Wikipublisher, and your conversions could really help in the
argument.
</quote>
>On Oct 5, 2008, at 9:09 PM, John Rankin wrote:
>
>> In response to user feedback and suggestions, I have made
>> a lot of minor enhancements to
>> http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/PublishPDF
>>
>> Release notes are at
>> http://www.wikipublisher.org/wiki/ReleaseLog/HomePage
>>
>> This recipe takes wiki pages or page collections
>> and turns them into a PDF laid out in a form suitable
>> for printing.
>>
>> The Wikipublisher project was recently chosen as a
>> finalist in the New Zealand open source awards 2008,
>> cited "for bringing the power of LaTeX to the world
>> of wikis". It's a tribute to the power of pmwiki and
>> the strength of the pmwiki community that projects
>> like Wikipublisher, basically a hobby, can achieve
>> as much as they do. So a huge thank you to Pm and
>> everyone who has contributed suggestions, bug
>> reports, and advice over the years.
>>
>> Information on the awards is at
>> http://www.nzosa.org.nz/2008-winners
>>


-- 
John Rankin
Affinity Limited
T 64 4 495 3737
F 64 4 473 7991
021 RANKIN
john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
www.affinity.co.nz





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