A while ago I rambled on about Wikis and PDFs, and looked at ways you could generate a PDF book based on a selection of Wiki articles.  The tools and solutions I looked at were... not up to the task so to speak.  The output was a problem, the extension I was toying with was abandoned by its developer, and no one had stepped up to continue with the development.

Then one day someone pointed me to an interesting extension developed by a German company called  PediaPress.  They have built a very nice little (well not so little actually) extension tool set that allows you to build a "collection" and then turn that collection into a nice PDF.

How do you use it?  Well, after installing and configuring the extension you get a nice new menu block on the left side of your Wiki.

Using the Add page link, you can add the page you are currently viewing to your personal Wiki article collection.  If a page you are viewing is already in your collection, the Add link turns into a Remove link.  After you add the pages you want to be a part of you book to the collection, you can click the Show collection link.  This takes you to an overview page that shows you all the pages you have added, and the order you added them in.  You can use the arrows to move pages around.  You can also add a book title and chapter breaks.

When you are done building your collection, you can save it as a personal or community collection.  If you are happy with the collection, you can download the PDF or even have it professionally printed by PediaPress.

One nice extra feature that they have added to this extension is the ability to "blacklist" Wiki Templates.  When you are building a book, some Templates used to organize and display information on the Wiki do not look right, or do not belong in a PDF book.  Adding the Templates you want to be ignored to the PDF blacklist is a quick and easy way to clean up the PDF and make it more readable in print.

Ok, fine, you can generate a PDF, but what does it look like?  Is it actually readable?  Is it just a jumble of text?  This is another area where you can see a lot of time and attention has been put into this extension.  The PDF is very well formatted - especially when you consider how basic the source material is.

The OpenOffice.org Wiki is in the process of implementing this extension so that everyone can build their own PDFs as well as so that we can provide "snapshots" of the various OpenOffice.org manuals and books that are being developed on the Wiki.

Next steps?  Well, how about being able to generate an ODT as well as a PDF?  It's being worked on by PediaPress, and I hope to be able to make this option available soon.
The PediaPress PDF Extension for Media Wiki is found here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection

The early Alpha test version of the ODT export functionality is found here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenDocument_Export

The OpenOffice.org Wiki has a new skin.... thanks to the efforts of two community members (jza and ivanm) the OpenOffice.org Wiki has the same look and feel as the new OpenOffice.org website.

Check it out at: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki

If you have any problems using the new skin, let us know on the dev-AT-website.openoffice-DOT-org  mailing list.

Second Life has been around for a while.  Waaaay back when it was still quite new, I gave it a try, setup an account and built a character.  I lasted about 10 minutes in the Second Life world until I was bored to tears, and logged off.  I didn't go back.  I simply didn't see the point or the appeal to this Second Life thing.  It seemed to have no purpose.  You logged in, and then there was no goal, no plan.. just you... standing there... you could walk around and interact with things and talk to people but... I can do that in real life, and real life was marginally more rewarding with its tactile feedback... so real life won out for me.

Sun has been doing a lot inside the Second Life world, and I have followed with some interest... mostly curiosity.. because I still didn't see the point to the whole thing.   I was wondering... why would Sun go and invest all this time and money into this Second Life thing?  What would be the gain?  What could they even do in there that would be of any interest or any value at all to anyone.. Sun employee or otherwise?

Sun announced that they were holding a big Sun event in Second Life on 29 April, and we were all invited to attend.  I resurrected my original avatar, dusted him off, made sure he was presentable, and registered him with Sun so that I would be identified as a Sun Employee in Second Life.  OK, that done, I had a few days to try and remember how things were done in Second Life... not too hard, but the Second Life developers could really take a lesson from Blizzard for in-world navigation (it's easier and more intuitive to control your avatar in World of Warcraft than it is in Second Life).

Anyway, 29 April rolls around and I log in.  I'm greeted by someone and given a teleport button.. click and I am whisked away to the Sun auditorium.  Interesting.  There are a lot of people around... all Sun employees.  A lot of the people are lost... not really in control of their characters... all doing the usual things we all do until we get used to the controls.. you know, arms flailing about in random directions, walking off cliffs, walking into walls, spinning in circles.  I make my way up the ramp to the auditorium seating area and find a free seat.  Hmmm cannot hear anything... oh wait, click the audio button and now I hear things... I can hear Rich Green talking... cool..

 

It quickly became clear to me that there actually may be some value to this Second Life thing, if only to be used to host virtual conferences.  Listening to the conference in Second Life was actually more attention grabbing than a simple conference call.  In Second Life you have something to focus on, a virtual person who, in this case looked remarkably like the real life person.  The audio was clearer and easier to pay attention to than on a conference call.  With conference calls I find my attention wandering as the voices drone on in my ear... but in SecondLife... I'm not sure why, but it was easier to follow, easier to hear, and my attention didn't fade out.  maybe it was the novelty, but... I have to admit, if Sun hosts any more info sessions in Second Life, I'll definitely attend.  Maybe there is something to Sun playing in this virtual world thing 

Wikis are fast becoming a core tool in a lot of companies.  People are using Wikis for just about everything... from a collaborative text editing tool, to the whole website for a project.  Basically.. who isn't using a Wiki these days?

OpenOffice.org is one project that is getting into the Wiki world in a big way.  For example, the OpenOffice.org documentation is being ported over to the OOoWiki.   To get there, we used the MediaWiki export functionality in OpenOffice.org.  This worked great.  The export is almost perfect - only a few small tweaks are needed if the source document is in good shape.

Now that the documentation is actually in the Wiki, we want to get it back out.  I don't mean as HTML in a single Wiki page.... I mean we want to be able to queue a stack of Wiki pages and export them all as a single ODT file.  The question is... how do you do this?

A few people have looked into this problem in the past, but no one yet (to my knowledge) has actually come up with a fully working MediaWiki to ODT export tool (with no "gotcha's" ).  The closest I have seen is found here http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/wiki2xml/php/  This is the source for an extension to MediaWiki.  Once it is installed and configured you get a new menu item in the "Special pages" section of your MediaWiki.  This page looks like this:

 

The output is reasonable (once you work around the various quirks and bugs in the extension), but it really needs a lot of post conversion work to turn the result into a presentable document.  One noticeable problem is that all the images are lost.  Well, not lost, but they are not included in the export.  They have to be added back into the exported document.  This is OK if you have 1 or 2 images to deal with, but in the case of a large document with a hundred or more images, it becomes quite cumbersome.  There are other issues as well that I have not yet resolved... such as.. .for some reason, the exported ODT file has 4 extra bytes at the beginning of the zip file.  OpenOffice.org cannot open this broken ODT.  The solution.. manually unzip the ODT, and zip it back up again.  I don't know if this problem is due to a bug in the PHP or if it is a problem with the Linux environment that the exporter and Wiki are running on.

This MediaWiki extension comes closest (from what I've seen) to providing the tools needed to do the round trip from OpenOffice.org to MediaWiki and back to OpenOffice.org.... but it's not quite there.  It needs a better user interface for one thing... it needs to be integrated into the Wiki itself, not tacked on as a "Special page".  It should be easy for readers to select multiple pages or entire Wiki books to be exported.  The export should also include the images that are used in each Wiki page.

Someone with a little XML knowledge.. someone who knows their way around PHP could probably fix this extension up,  add a little to it, and produce a really useful extension to MediaWiki.  Any volunteers?

I have been a bit busy lately... fighting with MediaWiki and losing.

One of my tasks right now is to get the OpenOffice.org wiki updated to the latest version of MediaWiki.  I have a staging wiki set up for testing, and have been working my way through the various settings in apache, and in MediaWiki.  Up until recently it has been going fairly well.  Apache is generally not that hard to deal with, and MediaWiki has also been relatively painless... that is until I tried to get the Short URL feature working in MediaWiki.

The default URL for MediaWiki includes index.php, so for example the default URL for the OOo Wiki would look something like this:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

but with the Short URL feature turned on it looks like this:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page 

This is what it works like right now on the existing OOoWiki.  Since the existing OOoWiki install has been using the short URL feature for years now, I must have it enabled on the updated wiki engine as well.

How is it enabled?  There are a bunch of different ways to do it depending on whether you have root access to the server or not.  I have root access, so that is the logical and also the best solution (it's worth noting that I have tried the non-root solutions, and get the same or similar results, mainly the 404 error I mention below).

The simple way to turn on this feature is the same method as is used by Wikipedia, and is documented here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL#Recommended_setup_.28Wikipedia_style.29

The short version is to edit the httpd.conf file and add

Alias /wiki /path/to/index.php

and then edit LocalSettings.php (the MediaWiki config file) and add the line

$wgArticlePath = /wiki/$1;

It should be that simple, but sadly as with many things to do with computers it never really is that simple.

The httpd.conf file already contains these aliases:

Alias /wiki/ "/space/mwiki/" 
ScriptAlias /wiki "/space/mwiki/"

So, I added

Alias /wiki /space/mwiki/index.php

right under the existing two, and added the option to the LocalSettings.php file... restart apache and see what happens.

With all three aliases in the httpd.conf and $wgArticlePath set to /wiki/$1 the wiki then just returns a 404 error

"The requested URL /wiki/Main_Page was not found on this server."

If I comment out the original two aliases (so that the only alias is the new one) and restart apache, and load http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page the main wiki page loads, but the default MediaWiki skin is not loaded.  Hmmm that's not so good.  On top of that, if I try the base URL http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/ which should load the Main_Page, MediaWiki wants to edit Index.php (note the capital I on the page name).

First issue... the Index.php problem is related to an apparent bug in MediaWiki 1.11.  The fix for this is to add another line to the LocalSettings.php file that looks like this:

$wgUsePathInfo = false; 

If I do that, I send MediaWiki into a redirect loop and am presented with this error:

Internal error

Redirect loop detected!

This means the wiki got confused about what page was requested; 
this sometimes happens when moving a wiki to a new server or 
changing the server configuration.

Your web server was detected as possibly not supporting URL path
components (PATH_INFO) correctly; check your LocalSettings.php 
for a customized $wgArticlePath setting and/or toggle $wgUsePathInfo
to true.

 To "fix" this I either remove the option and then have the problem with the wiki always wanting me to edit Index.php or I disable all of the Short URL changes and I'm back at the start again.

And so it goes... round and round.  If anyone at has a clue about this and knows of something I can do to get this working... or sees my mistake, feel free to leave a comment

Wikis, books and open source summits... an interesting combination.  Well... maybe not for everyone, but interesting to me... I'm such a nerd some days.

I'm pulling together my notes on Wiki books, and trying to answer a few questions like:

• Why put a book in a Wiki?
• The problems with books in Wiki format
• Some solutions we've found

I've been asked many times why anyone in their right mind would want to put a book or a manual into a Wiki.  Wikis have a flat disorganized structure.  There is no navigation to lead a reader from one page to the next.  There is no style control, editorial control, no way to print an entire book... and so on.  All very real arguments, but... the other side of the proverbial coin is that traditional book formats are difficult to manage, hard for open source community members to contribute to, and require special software and tooling to edit.  A Wiki provides a convenient, simple cross platform way of doing documentation without the need for any special software except a web browser.  That is a major plus when you are trying to pull together a scattered community of potential contributors.

The real question is, can the limitations of a default Wiki (in this case, MediaWiki) be managed so that the problems are resolved?  I think they can.  We've come up with a few creative solutions to a few of the issues we face with books in Wiki format.

We put the MediaWiki Template feature to good use.  It is amazing what you can do with Templates in MediaWiki.  The major tweak we have done is to use nested templates to generate a Table of Contents.  A Master TOC Template defines the layout, icons, borders, colors and so on.  Each part or chapter in a book gets a TOC template which calls the Master for it's layout, and contains essentially a bulleted list of Wiki pages in the order you want them presented in the book.  Nesting of topics is done with HTML div tagging.  The result is something that actually works quite well.

There are a lot of other features that MedaiWiki has by default that you can use to manage the books... such as sub-pages that can be used to help define the book structure, Watched pages so you can monitor edits, and so on.

There are still some unresolved issues... like, how do you generate PDF and ODF?  How do you monitor community edits across hundreds or even thousands of pages?  How do you define a released document since a Wiki is a "living" document? 

This will be the subject of my little 5 minute presentation on Monday next week (15 October).  Hopefully it'll generate a little interest, and maybe even some controversy and ideas.

I will be attending the SMI open Source Summit in October.  I will be doing a 5 minute Lightning Talk on Documentation in Wikis.  This is something I have been working on a lot in the last 6 or 7 months. 

I could waffle on for hours on the highs and lows of trying to put documentation into Wiki formats.  It's actually coming along fairly well  We have had lots of dead ends, but with a little back tracking and trying the next idea, the result is actually quite nice. 

It will all be rolled out soon.  There are a couple books (like the Administration Guide) up on the OOoWiki in the documentation section which use some of the things we are tinkering with.  There are still some changes that need to be made though to include all the little tweaks we need to make the books usable in Wiki format.

See.. there I go... waffling on...

The interesting bit about this conference is... I am supposed to bring a poster... a poster that is roughly 60cm x 100cm... on poster board/card.  The poster itself is not so hard to do I suppose (although my artistic talents are questionable).  The interesting bit is... how do I transport it from Hamburg to Santa Clara without it getting destroyed? 

Hmmm the imponderables of a Wednesday morning.

This is just a short one today.  I posted a bit of a summary of the OOoCon2007 over on the OOoTnT Blog
 P.S.  I fixed the link

The second half of day 1 was really interesting.  I spent most of the time following the sessions showcasing the Chinese modifications to OpenOffice.org.  The guys from RedOffice2000 are amazing.  The interface changes they have made to create RedOffice are really well thought out.  They took the traditional interface that we all grew up with, and transformed it into something that is strongly based on their own cultural needs and expectations.  The thing is... it also has a mass appeal to non-Chinese users too.  That was very much in evidence with the very first question asked after the presentation/demo was finished... "Do you have an English version?"  I have a feeling that the RedOffice guys were not expecting that question at all... just my observation of the momentary look of surprise that they had.  They answered that they currently do not have an English version, but there may be one in the distant future. 

Regardless... if you have a chance, go download the presentation and take a look.  There are several screen captures of the new interface, and you can get a feel for what they have done.  The main concept is to increase the editing area and put the tools on the left stide.  The tools are all iconified, and are grouped based on task (vs the more generic and not-so-task-based grouping we are used to with OOo).

Other presentations that stuck out in my mind from Wednesday.... the one from eZ.  This is a content amangement system that uses OOo to convert doucments on the fly into an dout of the CMS.  The URL is http://www.ez.no 

But on to Friday.  Most o fthe "interesting" presentations are done now (well interesting to me anyway).  The first session of the day was the OOo Council Q&A session.  This was much too short.  The really needed a lot more time, and I think that was something tehy will take away from this conference and consider for nect time.  There were loads of good questions being raised... some easy, and ohters more difficult.  The feeling you get is that everyone there really wants to see OOo succeed... hopefully Kiberpiper will have the video of that session up soon.

Anyway, another day at the conference... and more fascingating topics (I am such a nerd soem days).  Also... loads of meeting up with various people... putting faces to names from the mailing lists and forums.

More tomorrow... I hope.

Well, it's almost here... my very first official OpenOffice.org conference. We leave for Barcelona on Tuesday morning.

I'm actually looking forward to it.  It has been a very very long time since I've attended a conference where I am an active participant.  I've gone to many conferences in the past as an observer, and for the courses offered, but only once or twice have I had the opportunity to get up in front of the group and say my bit.  I hope we can fire up some interesting discussions in this coming week.... there are going to be some really long days I think.

With this conference, I have managed to get myself ankle deep (whilst standing on my head) in things.  But... that's part of the fun.  The stuff I am working on has a strong focus on the documentation... not just the books and application help, but all the other user resources like the OOoWiki and even forums.  We really want to drum up the community side of things.  For too long OpenOffice.org has been very one sided.  Open source yes, but also excruciatingly complicated for anyone to contribute anything... even a spelling correction in the help is painful to do.

Anyway, don't want to let the cat out of the bag (or as the Dutch say, let the monkey out of the sleeve) just yet   I will try to post a couple things while I am there... impressions... maybe even some photos.

There is a lot going on these days... starting to prepare for the OOoCon2007 in Barcelona.  This should be an interesting conference.  This will be my first OpenOffice.org conference, and I'll even be standing up in front of a few people and possibly even babbling on about a few things. 

I hope to have all the stuff I am working on ready to go for the conference.  Sigh... lawyers and legal stuff slowing it all up.  It is amazing how much effort has to go into converting something to open source.  The checking, the verification, the double checking, the signatures, the triple checking.  It's all worth it in the end though when the result will be opening up a little more of the OpenOffice.org world.

Oh another thing... still no hot water.  The repairman promised to have it repaired by Friday last week... or Monday at the latest... well, it's Tuesday now, and we are all still waking up to ice water showers.  One advantage of a shower in water that cold is that you are VERY awake when you finish.  there is no grogginess, and no question that you are alive and awake.  Ha ha.