export mediawiki pages to individual text files

From the client side (i.e. a browser), the pages will be rendered using HTML.

So, a HTML to xxx (PDF, Word, RTF, etc.) would certainly do the job.

Combine that with some sort of scripting engine to navigate the links and you should be done.

If you have a all the links already on 1 page (or an index or something), then that would certainly save some time.

Just googling around ...

A commercial offering ... http://html2pdf.seven49.net/Web/

There are also apps available on SourceForge and other places that do HTML 2 PDF.

What do you intend to do with the end results?

If you've got hundreds of good pages being edited/maintained, then why bother with a frozen snapshot? If you need a snapshot, clone the DB and lock it away.


There is also http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Export

This looks promising. You would need to script the navigation (I think), but certainly looks the way I would go if it was me.

Any way you look at the problem it's a lot of hard work.

At our company a MediaWIKI server was created to store documentation and over time the stakeholders have realized it's not what they want.  My time inherited maintenance of the server and we've been tasked with trying to find a way to move the content into other formats and all the solutions require a lot of time.

@Ted. Not for the faint hearted.

Thanks for the replies! I have the special: all pages which congregates links to all the pages which would probably become very handy. I should have specified this earlier but my first preference is to outpu word files : do you know any html 2 word tools that can be scripted to spit out a word file per link?

What version of Word?

You could probably just use MSWord to open the URLs directly.

Can you try doing one manually?

Load MSWord.
File|Open
Enter URL of page.

Does it look OK?

You are going to get some differences. Word is NOT natively a HTML rendering engine (or did that all change in Office 2007+ - yuech!)

If that is the case then a simple VBA macro would probably do the trick.

i tried opening directly, but 1) the rendering differences are big and ugly 2) i dont know how to log in to my wiki from word to access most of the content that is log-in only

i think what is needed is something that is able to export the main content of any given wiki page, but not the mediawiki navigation stuff etc, and then using that "pure" export (also without any mediawiki tags) and convert that to word somehow. my thinking is to try to convert all the pages to pdf files somehow (i might try  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Export ) but only if i know of a way to then convert those pdfs into word after?

p.s. also i need to work out how to script  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Export

p.p.s. its harder than i thought it woudl be, i agree!

What do you intend to do with all those word documents?

the content does not need to be shared anymore, so only i need local access, and i need offline access to this content in an editable form so Word is good for that, in addition to providing WYSIWYG. ...