WordPress annoyances

Warning: This is more of a rant than productive thought

maybe I’m just inexperienced, it probably doesn’t help that I don’t have admin access, but even asking coworkers whether something is possible seems to give me a “no”. Mind you, it’s not wordpress.org, but wordpress MU where my access is more or less restricted to the kinds of things I would be able to do on wordpress.com.

I haven’t figured out how or can’t do the following:

  • redirect pages (short of hardcoding it into the server)
  • make the frontpage not look for blog posts (and if there are none, not to display an error)
  • display subpages on a page (not in a navbar) short of manually doing it
  • change the width of a column (I know, I know, this is coded into the theme)
  • know exactly what it’s doing with my HTML code…. I’m stuck right now because I’m having a problem where the HTML code looks just fine but there’s something going wrong (thankfully a coworker is looking into that)

I’m sure I will be more and less frustrated with WP as I learn more about it.

When Wiki and HTML Formatting Collide

So I’ve been messing around with wiki coding since obviously I’ve been working on developing content on the wiki. One of the things I was trying to do was a hanging indent (here’s another more complex one where you don’t need to set a margin and documentation is better) in order to display citation examples properly. More than that, I wanted to offset the whole citation (i.e. add an indent) in order to make it stand out from the rest of the text.

Template Code (Hanging Indent)
Whether you look at the first or second template, they both modify the CSS in order to make the hanging indent. They essentially change two attributes:

margin-left:2em;
text-indent:-2em; (shifts the first line of a paragraph)

Now in order to indent a line or paragraph, there are usually a couple of ways to do it in wiki, but throw the hanging indent template into it and it didn’t always work out so well.

Add Wiki Code
Usually the best way to do a simple indent in wiki is using a colon, such as

: Indented text

However, I suspect that rather than adding to the margin, the wiki changes the margin for that text, and the hanging indent code overrides it. So, the result is that it does nothing.

Add HTML Code
The other option was to use the <blockquote> tag. As the blockquote does not interfere with the CSS styling, this had the intended effect except that just like in this post, if I use blockquote,

you get spacing before and after the blockquote as you would with a <p> tag

My Solution
Not a very elegant solution, and rather the brute force way, but I just ended up creating a template for citation examples that hard coded the extra margin. I suppose the other solution would have been to add an extra variable to the hanging indent template but I figured that would not be worth the trouble.

PDF2Wiki Conversion Comparison

So, some people may ask, why are you trying to convert PDF to Wiki? PDF is usually the last step in the process, so just use the original document. My response would naturally be, what if you don’t have the original document?

A Two-Step Process
Through my searching and reading on the topic, it seems there is no PDF2Wiki Converter. Every site that I have read explains converting the PDF to one of: DOC, RTF, HTML, XML first then to wiki format.

PDF2HTML
I tried a number of PDF to HTML programs, but none of them worked to my satisfaction. Most of them only converted simple formatting, such as bold and italics.  Adobe has an online conversion tool. It’s better than some of the others I’ve tried as it interprets lists and such. The resulting code is rather ugly and a lot of the code would need to be stripped before using a HTML to Wiki converter. See my previous post on HTML2Wiki for a couple of tools on tidying or stripping HTML code.

PDF2DOC
I found that a much better alternative was converting the PDF to a DOC/RTF file since it’s a lot simpler and some formatting might be lost, but you won’t have a lot of needless code that might mess up your wiki page. There are a lot of online tools that provide a PDF to DOC/RTF service, however, again, they only tend to do basic formatting.  Adobe Acrobat does a really good job, because it will change lists into formatted lists (instead of normal text).  The major downside of course is that Acrobat is a paid program though there is a 30-day trial.

Conclusion
I had a lot of problems in particular with PDF to HTML, so I thought PDF to DOC/RTF is simply. Honestly though, unless you have a PDF file which is really long and has a lot of simple formatting (bold, italics, etc.), if you cannot get your hands on Acrobat, then I suggest simply copy/paste (or alternatively save as a text file) and manually formatting it in the wiki’s editing box. Of course this depends on the wiki you’re using because ones that don’t have a toolbar to help you quickly format might be a bit of a pain. Someone please let me know if you have found a better method!

DOC2Wiki (Word2Wiki) Converters Comparison

So to continue on ways to convert existing documents to wiki code, next is formatted text documents, which is typically word DOC files, but may also be something like RTF files.

Most sites I found actually just instructed people to use a 2 step conversion. From Word to HTML and then to wiki code. While this may work, it’s much less efficient and I can imagine more things are lost in the process. Admittedly, the converters that I have found are all geared towards MediaWiki, so if you’re using a different wiki then these converters may not work so well. Nevertheless, MediaWiki provides a list of Word to Wiki converters the most basic of which does not seem to be specifically geared to MediaWiki.

OpenOffice Sun Wiki Publisher Plugin (MAC and Windows compatible, not sure about other platforms)
(the wiki converter is built-in, the publishing part of it is optional)
The downside of OpenOffice is that it does not always interpret word documents very well. Embedded images tend to turn into hex code (ex. ffd8ffe000104a46494600010201 etc.) and tables aren’t always interpreted correctly either. The one I tried turned into overlapping text. So, in part, the usefulness of the outputted wiki code will depend on how well OpenOffice has read the word DOC itself, but it should handle ODT and RTF just fine.

Word2MediaWikiPlus Macro (Windows Only)
Word is the better choice for documents that OpenOffice can’t seem to handle very well. There is also a Word2MediaWiki Macro which is easier to use, but does not convert tables or deal with images very well.

Special Characters
For the OpenOffice plugin, ‘special characters’ (used loosely here) sometimes turn into weird symbols or random special characters. As with the HTML converters from the last post, something like ’ (not straight apostrophe) gets changed into ‚Äô, or a bullet point (which isn’t recognized to be in a bulleted list) turns into ‚Ä¢.
The Word2MediaWikiPlus (W2MWP) converter is better at dealing with special characters. The macro will simply insert the character as is and at times put a nowiki tag around it, but regardless, it displays just fine.

Text Boxes
For some reason, the W2MWP plugin turns text boxes into a single cell table and then repeats the same text again as regular text (not inside a table). The OpenOffice plugin strips the text of formatting and leaves it as regular text in the wiki output.

Tables
When tables are interpreted correctly, I think the OpenOffice plugin does a better job overall. The W2MWP macro is better at keeping formatting, such as colours and border style (below right), but OpenOffice one seems to interpret things inside a table better, such as type of lists (below left). (It’s supposed to be a bulleted list, not a numbered list.)

Needs Good Original Document Formatting
In both cases, the usefulness of the wiki code will depend on how well the original document was formatted. For example, in one of the documents I tested, a number of the number and bullet lists were not formatted as such, but instead, numbers and bullets were just manually added. In both plugins, they were considered to be regular text with a ‘special’ character or number at the beginning of it.

Conclusion
Whether the Word2Wiki or the OpenOffice plugin is better depends on your priorities. OpenOffice seems to interpret lists and text boxes better, and doing a replace all for characters that weren’t interpreted properly is a pretty quick step. W2MWP is better at keeping formatting and interpreting all characters. So, if you like the way your document looks and you want to keep it that way, use the W2MWP macro.  The big downside of course is that it doesn’t work on MACs (which I’m using right now, yay for VMware).  Nevertheless, my conclusion is that the DOC2Wiki Converters are useful, but may not be the optimal solution depending on how much you’re willing to install and play around with. And if the document isn’t formatted like it should be, then manual wiki formatting might be the way to go.