On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 3:33 PM, Ronnie Tucker<[email protected]> wrote: > > Sounds like your going to have to if you want it to take up less time. > > For instance, I'm dead set against the wiki being used as a database > like this. It's not meant for collaborative writing and is the wrong > tool for the job. Even a google doc spreadsheet would be more structured > as you could export it. > > > I'm not sure about now, but when I last looked in to Google Docs (prior to > using a wiki) it had some limitations, file size if I remember rightly, > which meant we couldn't open a new document with the necessary images in the > document. Also using Google Docs would mean inviting proof-readers to each > document which is a bit of a pain, unless this has changed... > > Get together some scripts to generate svg xml based on your data, then > you a hop away from just re-editing it in place instead of copying and > pasting. > > Your also on track to be able to feed it into html. > > > I have no idea about that stuff and, since we're volunteer based, if people > don't volunteer, I can't magic them (but I wish I could!) :/ > > Ultimately what you want is a way for all your writers and collaborators > to contribute and for there to be a very minimal set of editing tasks > that join everything together. > > > Absolutely, but there doesn't seem to be a good set of tools available at > the moment. Most CMS apps are either missing something or just do what we do > now (ie: wiki).
I believe this can be done creating the HTML version first, and use that to create PDF. The MediaWiki system can be extended to use the "Collections" system which can generate PDF output. If you skinned the wiki to create the look of your magazine, and used article subpages to create the multiple pages of each edition, you could then publish to PDF while the article was maintained in wiki text markup. See http://freephile.org/wiki/index.php?title=Collections as a backgrounder. Several books have been authored and published this way. The beauty of using the wiki as your "pre-press" environment is that it has all the goodness of diff and collaboration plus it can serve the content to the HTML world. I hope that helps. Best regards, Greg -- Greg Rundlett nbpt 978-225-8302 m. 978-764-4424 -skype/aim/irc/twitter freephile http://profiles.aim.com/freephile -- ubuntu-marketing mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-marketing
