Author in wiki, generate PDF documents, CHM files or embedded help

Question

Anyone know of a wiki or wiki plugin that generates a PDF file or CHM file that spans the entire wiki?

• I would like to have control of the table of contents.
• I would like the internal and external links to work.
• Ideally allow for tweaking the output template, but that is not a deal-breaker.

I want to generate content using WIKI syntax and mindset (lots of cross-links etc), but ship the content in PDF, CHM or an embedded application form. Something friendlier than installing the wiki software on the enduser machine...

Answer 1

The MediaWiki PDF Export extension allows you to select a group of PDF pages. I've not installed it yet, so unsure if it's easy to use that feature to select all the pages.

Answer 2

JIRA (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/default.jsp) is your geeky wet dream in terms of control; it exports to PDF (amongst other) and you can have complete control of pages, TOC and other aspects, although expect some complexity to set it up.

Answer 3

Confluence lets you choose pages when you export to PDF a space
But you can't customise a lot the PDF made
You can customise it through a theme (based on velocity)

By the way confluence is 5$ for 5 users until today http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2009/04/confluence_and_3.html

Answer 4

Sphinx (http://sphinx.pocoo.org/) is a fairly nice tool for generating HTML (or CHM) and PDF documentation, with wiki-like syntax. It is not a wiki; you can't edit through the web and generating HTML requires a build process. Still, it is pretty nice, with cross-references, fairly simple markup, and (in the HTML output) a search engine implemented in JavaScript with no server-side dependencies beyond static file hosting. Sphinx was developed for the new version of the Python documentation and is pretty themable; for example, the GeoServer project (which I work on, excuse the shameless plug) is using Sphinx with a custom theme for the new version of their user and developer manuals.

Answer 5

XWiki does this out of the box.

Answer 6

Microsoft has an HtmlHelp Authoring tool that can create chm files from html files.

If you need the help files both on the web and within deployed applications, generating the help from the same files used on the web could be a great solution. If the help site was created using asp.net (ie database driven) it might be worth using basic styles and creating a tool to generate html files by reading in the served out pages?

Have a look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms524239%28VS.85%29.aspx

I guess one could also additionally then create a PDF from the Html pages?