[WikiFM] [Python-Berlin] WikiFM needs some Python love

[Riccardo Iaconelli]

Hello,

let's continue this discussion! I would say this is a very interesting
topic for the WikiFM mailing list (now in CC). I send this last e-mail
including python-berlin to invite everyone interested in the
discussion to please subscribe here:
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/wikifm

The PDF generation comes directly from my personal experience (and the
one of the initial WikiFM team) of Physics student, where I would have
to read and remember 200+ pages of math for every exam. For this,
being able to print on paper the subjects was a real advantage - it is
very hard to study by heart and jot small notes on a PC screen.

Reportlab is indeed the first backend that was used in production, and
currently still is (even with some bugs), but is not always the right
solution. When you are writing about purely mathematical subjects,
unfortunately LaTeX is (as far as my knowledge goes) the only option
on the table to support the complex typesetting needed. See for an
example: http://www.wikifm.org/images/uploads/f/fe/Metodimat.pdf .
This work was done by two of my classmates who simply decided to share
with their colleagues their notes taken (by hand) in class. And this
happened for many other subjects, too.

However, your suggestions are absolutely valid for other topics, and
sometimes even better! If you are studying code, it is much less
valuable to download and print out a PDF and it is much more
interesting to have interactivity built in the web page!

For example, the initiative I was referring to is trying to produce
material for scientifical computation training actively told me that
they would be looking for a solution which would do something like
this:

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/algorithm/unique

and yes, Jupiter seems really suited for this!! I simply haven't had
the time (and knowledge) to integrate it yet...

Since you seem to be very interested and knowledgeable on the topic,
do you think you could help us to move this forward in any way? We are
full of scientists but we really lack somebody with a strong
background in this (hence the call for help). :)

Bye,
-Riccardo


On 6 May 2015 at 08:27, Dinu Gherman <gherman at darwin.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> Hi Riccardo,
>
> first sorry for my rather late reply! I maybe did what you describe below or something similar in a previous life, 15 years ago, based on reportlab (rather than latex) which at least was used by Mediawiki to create the "personal wikipedia books" or whatever they were/are called.
>
> So while I might be able to help at least in theory I'm not sure I understand some concepts of WikiFM. Especially I wouldn't expect students (not even technical ones) today to want to take notes in LaTeX (in fact I know a little German IT publishing house who recently switched from LaTeX to asciidoc/DocBook), and I'd regard the feature of creating PDF as less important than you seem to do.
>
> In today's world I'd rather bet the future of such a system on a high degree of interactivity and shareability based on something like the emerging jupyter.org notebook technology which provides an excellent multi-language research environment that is actually executable, reproducible and persistent (and, yes can be converted into PDFs, too). Commercial offerings include wakari.io, but jupyter should be available as open source.
>
> If you have more questions, maybe let's better continue off-list... ;-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Dinu
>
>
> Am 03.05.2015 um 21:28 schrieb Riccardo Iaconelli:
>
>> Dear Dinu,
>>
>> WikiFM is currently based around many technologies; Mediawiki is
>> indeed at the core, but Python is not a second-class citizen at all.
>> In particular, Python is currently used for the PDF generation,
>> probably the most important feature of WikiFM. As Tamara said, you can
>> find additional information (and links) at the following page, which I
>> quickly drafted as a reference for potential contributions.
>>
>> Let me link it again in case someone else missed it, too:
>> http://www.wikifm.org/index.php/Contributing_to_WikiFM
>>
>> Do not hesitate to reply here, send a mail to the mailing list or
>> message me privately in case you need further information or anything
>> else. :)
>>
>> I am willing to go over the details of what could be nice to have with
>> you in the following days. We can organize also a little IRC/VoIP
>> meeting, if you think it might be of help. Take in consideration that
>> this is a project made by volunteers and hackers like you and me, so
>> any ideas on shaping the development is well accepted. Also take in
>> consideration that we raised a tangible interest in some science
>> institutions (like CERN), and I have been ventilated a concrete
>> possibility to get, in the future, individual developer grants in
>> order to further software development, if they are pleased with the
>> basic functioning of the project.
>>
>> Bye,
>> -Riccardo
>
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