To use UICI LIBRIS, you need a write access to a MediaWiki (with a few mandatory extensions enabled), and you hace to intall the application uicilibris.
First: author the contents of the future book
Create separate pages in the mediawiki. Each page must have its own structure in chapter, section, subsection, subsubsection. Those are denoted in mediawiki language by "= chapter title =", "== section title ==", etc. The more "=" delimiters, the lowest hierarchical level.
The pages may contain MediaWiki templates. Those are enclose in double curly braces like this: "{{Template name| first parameter| etc.}}". Some of the templates may have different intrpretations in MediaWiki and in Uicilibris.
All of the contents of individual pages will be translated to LaTeX
Uicilibris will process the contents of the page to make LaTeX source. This process takes in account template expansion. Some templates may be exapanded in different ways by MediaWiki and Uicilibris.
The WikiTitle of the page is not relevant
Beware of the wikititle: it will never be taken in account when trnaslation to a LaTeX document. If you want the wikititle to be part of the Latex output, you must repeat it in the page's content, for example as a title, subtitle, etc.
The WikiTitle can also be referred as the "outer title of the page".
Second: write a "table of contents"
To make a book: create a wikipage which contains a sequence of wikilinks to other pages. A wikilink is denoted in mediawiki language by "[[The outer title of the linked page]]"; the double opening and closing brackets are mandatory.
No text from this table of content will be included in the LaTeX document
Consequences are:
- only the wikilinks are significant
- all other elements can be considered as comments, and adviseably be used for this purpose
- as non-links are interpreted by Mediawiki, they can be used to make a visible structure in that wikipage. This structure should not be contradictory with the wanted structure of the book, or you van be mislead.
- every single wikipage linked from this table of content must contain the relevant structure elements for LaTeX. The name of the wikilink will never be used for the LaTeX source. So chapter titles, section titles, etc. must be inside the linked wikipages. Never trust the name of a wikilink in the table of contents.
Third: process your book locally
To process a book: launch the python program uicilibris, drag-drop the URL of the book to uicilibris' drop area. For example, with Firefox, you should drag the little icon which appears on the left side of the URL in the navigation toolbar. This icon can be different from the one displaied in the next thumbnail image.
There is another possibility to drag the URL of a wikipage: the word "page" on top of the panel you are just reading is a good candidate for dragging the URL of this page. This can be used as an alternative to the icon in the navigation bar.
You can also copy and paste the source of a wiki page into the so-called "Drop area".
As a last possibility, you can also enter the wikilinks by hand. The format of a wikilink is: [[Some words enclosed in double square brackets]]. The wikilinks must point to a wiki page. The drawback of the methods which don not use drag/drops is that uicilibris will miss the base address of the mediawiki to fetch links.
A successful drop yelds wiki code in uicilibris' first panel
If the drop succeeds, you should be able to read the contents of the page whose URL you have dragged, in wiki source format.
Then click the button "Links to LaTeX". The relevant wikipages will be downloaded and their contents will be processed and concatenated into the second panel of the application.
Successful retrieval of linked wikipages yeld a parseable LaTeX source
You will find in uicilibris' second panel
a parseable LaTeX source file for a book. If you want, you can just copy it and paste it in your favorite LaTeX IDE.
Uicilibris gives tools to get the images, compile the book and view it
In the panel containing the LaTeX source, a button "Run PDFLatex" allows you automatically (1) download all the images (2) run pdflatex.
If a PDF file can be made, a button "View PDF" is enabled; this button is not enabled upon compilation failure. In either case, a log of the action of pdflatex is included in the log panel (third panel in uicilibris' user interface)
The logfile can be searched easily for errors inside Uicilibris
In the bottom of the third panel, a combo box allows to search easily strings like "error" in the log report. You can add custom search strings.
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