Features & Development

offline version of some documentation

offline version of some documentation

by Dick Lane -
Number of replies: 2
Is it possible to create a downloadable snapshot of some sections of the WeBWorK documentation?  E.g., there could be
a)  bi-monthly snapshots of stuff for Instructors
b)  monthly snapshots of stuff for WeBWorK administrators
c)  weekly snapshots of stuff for problem authors (especially the techniques and subject area templates sections, together with the main stuff about MathObjects)

In reply to Dick Lane

Re: offline version of some documentation

by Jason Aubrey -
Hi Dick,

Yes, the most direct process right now would be easy but manual. In the side-bar on the wiki there is the "create a book" link. It's a nice mediawiki extension for creating pdf books of any content you care to collect from the wiki. It's sponsored by pediapress.com and is used by Wikipedia.

There are a ton of mediawiki extensions, maybe there is one out there that would make this automatic. The place to look would be

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extensions

feel free to suggest any you think might be useful; I can easily install them.

A second option would be to use the mediawiki api. There are interfaces for this api in probably most programming languages (including perl), and in principle one could use this to write a script that gets the desired content, converts it into the desired format, and saves it in the desired place. This probably wouldn't be too hard to implement depending on how you'd like it to work.

Jason
In reply to Jason Aubrey

Re: offline version of some documentation

by Dick Lane -
I appreciate that I have several options to serve my individual desires, but I think there is a larger audience for a stable, common, always-accessible set of documents.

    The online documentation has been inaccessible several times this spring (2011 Memorial Day weekend being merely the most prolonged).  This situation can occur even while problems we write, or are about to write, are available on other servers (accessible by us and our students).

    My immediate interest is the variety of annotated templates for special techniques and subject-area topics; general info about MathObjects is also important.  During the recent outage, I was able to locate suitable exemplars for about half of my questions by using some Headers and DEFs (for subject area templates) appended to my MAA-2011alpha collection of problems [http://webwork.maa.org/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=2458].  On the other hand, fixing a truly-bozo blunder in another problem did not happen until I examined a suitable snippet in the Problem Techniques section.