Question

Wiki is a great tool, but it is also a great text formatter.

I want to use just the text formatter. is it possible to have it from command line.

e.g.:

cat mytext | twikiformatter > output.html

possible usage: pretty-format reports (its easier to generate twiki text than HTML...)

Environment

Answer

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Have you check good old troff. It is an utility for text processing under most unix (and linux). It might do the trick for your needs.

-- AntonioVega - 08 Sep 2005

Interesting. There are, of course, many different text formatting packages out there already, as Antonio highlights. To use the TWiki rendering engine as a formatter, you need the context of a TWiki installation. However that installation wouldn't actually need a web server, it would just sit on your disk. You could simply run the view script in the bin directory from the command line to render a TWiki topic, providing the appropriate CGI parameters interactively, and it would print to STDOUT. A script to provide a friendlier interface to the renderer could be knocked up in a few minutes (with DakarRelease, anyway. It would be a bit more complicated with Cairo (the current release) but could still be done). Look at the view script, and the DakarRelease unit tests, for ideas.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 08 Sep 2005