Question

I've been using TWiki at my company for a few days now and before I ask the rest of my team to start committing their ideas via TWiki, I want to make sure that we can get the content out at any point. Aside from a printing and simple copy/paste function - which doesn't retain formatting such as hierarchy - is there another way to export from TWiki? I'm thinking tab delim .txt or RTF, etc.

Thanks,

-- SamirSingh - 30 May 2003

Answer

Is data/Webname/*.txt what you want?

-- MartinCleaver - 31 May 2003

You could export it as HTML (for example using the PublishAddOn) and then import that into other apps like M$ Word.

Also for a programmer who knows Perl it is not to hard to create a converter that produces a different format, e.g. an XML standard like DocBook.

-- PeterThoeny - 01 Jun 2003

I found a simple way to get the content of a single web page out to MSWord2000. I simply performed the following steps:

1. From IE (at this time I am not sure if it is necessary but I closed the Favorites menu) select File>Save As and save the page as *.html
2. From MSWord File>Open the same *.html and then
3. File>Save As and select file type to be *.rtf (I have not tried *.doc yet)

Works like a charm.

I am a fan of Opera and the same process is successful there with two differences:

1. Opera saves the file as *..html.txt (yes two dots, so the .txt and the extra dot must be removed before loading into MSWord)
2. I have only tested saving with graphics and while IE saves these items in a sub directory, Opera saves them in the same directory.

-- RayIngs - 25 Aug 2003

At our company I have made a little export tool based on the open source package of HTMLDOC (http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/). We made a special HTML form (TWiki page) that allows people to select a group of pages to be exported. The HTML form calls a CGI script that formats and passes the parameters (TWiki URL's) to the HTMLDOC tool after which HTMLDOC will create a monolithic PDF document which will be emailed to the requestor. By using custom templates and the 'skin' option at the end of each TWiki URL it is possible to customize the look of your PDF output as well.

-- PatrickVanDerVeken - 04 Dec 2003

In terms of further processing, PDF isn't much better than TWiki's .txt format. I found the plain skin useful for this purpose, e.g. http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Support/ExportingFromTwiki?skin=plain You can open this directly from Word, although you still need to tinker with your style definitions.

-- PeterKlausner - 04 Dec 2003