The task of converting a HOWTO to the wiki is important in the year 2009 . Here some summaries.

Preliminaries

HOWTOs are available in the LDP collection under various formats, not all for all HOWTOs. Specially source can be from Docbook xml or Docbook sgml (?), Linuxdoc sgml, sometime text only or html only.

Conversion can also be seen from source to wiki or from wiki to Docbook xml.

Converting from Wiki to Docbook xml

See Exporting_to_docbook

Converting from the LDP collection to the Wiki

HOWTOs Without Licence

This can be done only by an admin of the wiki as the wiki page have to be write protected. Use the special Template and paste the raw text of the HOWTO inside brackets.

Use html as Source

Converting

If the single html page is available, it's the easier source for the conversion, as the only good converter to Moin is the perl html2wiki script. If the HOWTO is only available as text see below. If it's available as Docbook and Docbook xml convert well, you can use it, but the Docbooktohtml converter needs many dependencies that are probably best fitted on the LDP servers.

If ever only the xml source is available, it may be usefull to first sumit this one to the submit list with a word to say what must be done of the result. If you don't want it to be published, you can ask to have a copy of the single html file.

Install the html2wiki perl script and fix it as explained here (very easy):

http://wiki.tldp.org/Converters#Perl

then convert to output.moin as shown.

Inserting in the Wiki

Open in the wiki a new page with the exact same name as the HOWTO. Use the HOWTO Template (do not touch the top admonition with links to the tldp Web site, it will adapt itself to the HOWTO name).

Fill a note to say what you did, why, what is the licence. paste the converted text in the wiki edit windows (use the text mode). Save.

Fixing

In the wiki (and the Docbook rendering), the table of contents is automatically created, so you have to remove the html one. But the sections are also automatically numbered, so you have to remove the fixed numbers. It's better to keep the html table until all the fixed numbers are removed and all the references wikified.

Use Text as Source

The txt to wiki conversion don't works well. It's almost impossible to guess in a full text document what is code, what is example and what is normal text.

The simpler way is not to convert at all, that is make it manually. It can be very fast.

Open a wiki page, paste text in it between triple brackets (aka raw). move the upper triple brackets to the bottom during the convert process, following your work.

You can also use the GUI edit interface. There is a small "paste as text" icon. But this simply add line breaks for each and any ne line in the original text and may be more difficult ans painfull to fix than the simple method.

See http://wiki.tldp.org/Converters#TxttoMoin.