Conversion of a Wiki or set of Tiddlers to a book or thesis?

#1

I know this topic has been discussed at various times before, but times and ideas move on.

What techniques / tools are there for converting a TW to a book or thesis? It’s great tool of course for the structure, research and writing stage but the challenge is how to pull this together. This could be directly with a plugin or via export to some intermediate step to Pandoc or Scrivener maybe? Output perhaps to rtf, docx or pdf?

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#2

I’m writing eBooks in TW. The Memory Keeper defines various book elements. The goal is to be able to export these book elements into an ePub file. At some point I plan to write the export method. ePub is one of the simplest formats—it is simply a zip file of the book elements. I have yet to start this export method.

#3

I worked on an epub export plugin last month for a personal project. It is fully functional - though the UI could use more work - just need some clean up, documentation and packaging before I can share it.

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#4

Please do. Glad I asked the question. It might fast track @clsturgeon too!

Thank you.

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#5

I think there should be a new thesis-edition.
http://tesis.tiddlyspot.com/ has aged a little meanwhile.
While writing I would say I would say

Perhaps it should also incorporate a presenter to ease discussing the scientific work in courses

#6

The easiest way is probably to straight up separate research from production and keep the research in the wiki and the production of the final artifact in your tool of choice (though I admit I find myself slipping on that one at times).

Another approach is to tag the tiddlers that will make up the final work so that you can use a filter to find them, export them to static HTML, then convert to other formats via Pandoc (https://pandoc.org/). That will probably require some amount of massage to work, but most existing tools probably would.

If you implemented your own CSS + theme for TiddlyWiki to use during export you could probably get a pretty decent layout of the export to be able to run through a converter.

#7

I will just add that given a wiki with all your content you can create a single tiddler designed to present the compiled book, for reading online OR open the tiddler in new window and crtl-p to print, using a print to PDF.

  • There are some tricks to handle page breaks and stop breaks occurring mid sentence or paragraph, we can discuss if you take this approach.
  • It has also being pointed out saving the “book” as html allows import to Microsoft Word for final “print preparation”.
#8

This is a dream for me!
I expect TW to be able to work like reStructuredText.

You can create pdf and real ebook by reStructuredText.

TiddlyWiki has most of the elements you find in reStructuredText.

But I believe it is not hard to make a plugin or edition for TiddlyWiki to create e-books and theses.

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