Hi,

right now the documentation for cocoalib is written in plain text.

With my little experience with wiki I saw that the markup is very simple (quite enough for the scope) and leave the pure text file quite readable (unlike html/xml/tex)

But I cannot find a way to browse such a file (except putting it into a wiki, or using emacs).

Something nice would be a plugin for a browser or a converter into html, so that a normal user doesn't have to install big things. I've been looking for such a thing for ages without success (I tried a couple of greasemonkey scripts for Firefox), but maybe I'm just using the wrong keywords....

Any suggestion?

Ciao
Anna

Hello Anna,

the only real parser for the wikitext that MediaWiki uses is the MediaWiki parser itself. That one is really a twisted piece of software that you don't want to mess around, especially after its rewrite during the last release. There are numerous projects of people trying to come up with parsers for wikitext in all kinds of programming languages, the most promising one was some Python code by the OLPC foundation, but most of them are quite outdated and have been abandoned and none of them really support the full wikitext. I spent some days on this and I'd say that it's fruitless to try and find a parser that might enable one to really render into something else but the XHTML that the MediaWiki software generates. There might be a principal problem with grammatics here, too, but I didn't pick that compiler construction CS course to be able to tell. You might either try to render the resulting XHTML, but I don't think that this will be any easier, or use a limited subset for text markup and write your own parser.

What makes things easier, the latter has already been done by somebody: The txt2tags software can convert text markup into a number of end formats, including (X)HTML, LaTeX, Man pages and even MediaWiki's wikitext (their web site has been done completely in txt2tags as well). And somebody even wrote a so-called "desktop wiki" software for it, Wixi, which is a program that can be used like a Wiki locally. So this might be close to what you are looking for.

Cheers,
Karsten

Thanks!!!

We plan to use just a small subset and I was about to start thinking of making my own converter, but the indication you are giving in the last lines might be exactly what I've been looking for!

I'll have a look next week.

Ciao
Anna