DocBook Wiki

Bismil'lahir-Rahmanir-Rahim In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful

The Features of DocBookWiki

DocBookWiki can display DocBook documents online. Different from the other applications, which convert a DocBook document into HTML first, in order to display it online, DocBookWiki converts it on the fly, so that the format for saving the document will still be XML (DocBook). In order to do this efficiently, DocBookWiki splits it first into chunks, according to chapters, sections etc.

It can also display a list of books, and for each book it can support multiple languages (translations). When the reader is reading a certain section of a book and he changes the language, he will see the same section in the selected language.

DocBookWiki can also be used to edit a DocBook document online, from the web. Editing is done one section at a time, so the editor selects first the section that he wants to edit, and then edits it. He can edit it in several modes: text (like wiki), xml (the original format), html, latex, texi, etc., whichever is more suitable for him. The changes, however, are always saved in the XML(DocBook) format. Authentication of the editors (with username, password) can be enabled as well, if necessary. Also, different editing permissions can be assigned to editors.

It allows the viewers of a document to download the document in other formats, like PDF, RTF, Plain HTML, LaTeX, PS, etc. which can be generated automatically from the DocBook format.

DocBookWiki will also try to keep a history of all the modifications made to the document, by keeping the document chunks in CVS, and so keeping track of all the changes.

The features of DocBookWiki can be summarized like this:

• Can display a DocBook document online.
• Can display several documents at once (a list of books).
• Can display each of them in several languages.
• Allows to edit a certain section of a certain book in a certain language.
• Editing can be done in several modes, like text, html, xml, texi, latex etc.
• The basic format is always DocBook (XML), no matter how it is displayed or edited.
• Each document (in each language) can be converted automatically into other formats (like PDF, RTF, LaTeX, etc.) for downloading.
• All the history of modifications is kept (in CVS) and any previous versions of a document can be recovered (by tag or by date) by the admin of the site.
• Authentication of editors can be enabled and admin can assign different access rights and permissions to the editors.

In short, DocBookWiki will be like a wikiwiki which saves the content in XML (DocBook) format.

Related Links

• kushtetuta
• kushtetuta (in edit mode)
• book (demo)
• book (edit demo) (user: guest, passwd: guest)

• code documentation

• doc-book project at SourceForge
• doc-book-users@lists.sourceforge.net
• doc-book-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net

Kushtetuta (Constitution) is the initial web application which represents online the Albanian Constitution. DocBookWiki is a successor of Kushtetuta, intended to improve and to generalize it.

Download and Install

DocBookWiki is built using PHP and the phpWebApp framework. DocBookWiki uses xsltproc (in Linux), so the only supported platform is Linux. See a list of dependencies in the freshmeat page. Installation instructions can be found in the file INSTALL in the project. Read also the file README.

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