Mediawiki to Indesign/XML?

August 9, 2007 3:08 PM

I have a book on a wiki (mediawiki). I will be laying out that book in InDesign. Is there any way to whoooosh the content straight from mediawiki to the InDesign template (via XML or something)?

So far I haven't been able to find any sort of mediawiki XML export that preserves all the italics and such -- I don't really care about revision histories or anything, just document structure/formatting. I remember when I tried to write my own wikisyntax parser in applescript, and I'd rather not revisit that particular level of hell.

posted by Tlogmer to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Yeah, I was hoping to do that with the wikibooks.org project. Their current pdf outputs are sad. They need some decent graphical layout design.

I couldn't figure out a way either. But I'd be willing to help you find one, or I'd love to know about your results.
posted by sethwoodworth at 4:08 PM on August 9, 2007

Take a look at Em Software. Back in the Quark 3 days, they had software that would easily let you search for and replace SGML tags with Xpress tags. Looking at their current offering, I would think you'd find a way to do what you're asking.
posted by ba at 4:46 PM on August 9, 2007

From what I can see, the html source for a wiki page is really 'clean' – not obfuscated with inline CSS tags or bloated font tags. Just simple html tags. If you can get your book on one page, save the html, and then chop off the header/footer nonsense, it would be fairly painless to parse the html with a few MS Word macros, or whatever else you have at hand. Or even just opening that file in something that can open HTML and save to RTF.

You could also search for other formatting, such as paragraph indents or heading paragraphs, and assign them a dummy style that you can preserve when you import into InDesign.
posted by cowbellemoo at 6:49 PM on August 9, 2007

Alright, I'll see what I can do. There's a time crunch, so I might end up postponing the indesign part until later.
posted by Tlogmer at 9:52 PM on August 9, 2007