Bug:381

This is a wiki page for tracking bugs relating to the mw2html script.

This saves us from having a wiki page for each and every bug (about the script) that is a residual issue. They can share this one.

Bug Links:
 * Bug:357 - P1 [RESOLVED - FIXED] new title] mw2html no longer styling pages correctly.
 * Bug:361 - P2 [RESOLVED-FIXED] Ability to exclude foreign language pages from local copy of help.
 * Bug:380 - P1 [RESOLVED - FIXED] Audacity cannot open Quick Help.
 * Bug:384 - P4 mw2html Import / Export Preferences page mistitled

Residual Issues

 * [P4?] .vcproj version not not finding python for Gale on Win 7 x64. Assumed to be a 64-bit issue
 * Gale noticed some "minor issues" in testing 05May11:
 * [P4] "Local manual in use" in the sidebar points to /help/manual/man/index.html which isn't now the Manual front page - regression on 1.3.12.
 * [P4] Images point online although being read locally, so give errors if clicked on and user offline.
 * [P5] The six "mediawiki_*.html" pages are in help/manual/man but ideally would be better in some less obvious location like help/manual/m/skins.

Policy on Bundled Manual

 * We are not going to bundle all languages in the Windows/Mac Audacity installers.
 * We are and will continue to bundle English language in these installers.
 * There is not an urgency to sort out what we will do for other languages until those language versions approach completeness.

Fragility
The mw2html script is relatively fragile, and changes, for example in our re-write rules for our site, can easily throw it out of kilter. It looks for particular patterns, and if they aren't there, it will fail.


 * Currently looks for 'quick_help' or 'man' at the end of a URL, and moves these to the top level.
 * Currently looks for '/xx' or '/xx_xx' at the end of a url in an  link, and rejects that link (as being a foreign language link) if it finds it.
 * Custom replacement of sidebars and portlets.
 * Special rule to enable index.html?xyz to 'masquerade' as a css file - a trick that MediaWiki introduced to give more flexibility in styling.

Size Issue
The resulting collection of files has over 12Mb of images. With a tiny loss of color fidelity that is so slight it is hardly noticeable, this can be brought down to 6.5Mb using imagemagick. That's well worth doing. This is one line batch script to do this under windows:

FOR /R %%a IN (*.png) DO mogrify -posterize 64 %%a

Following up with a:

FOR /R %%a IN (*.png) DO convert -quality 90 %%a %%a

brings the size down to 5.2Mb

Future Issues

 * P2/3? (but only when we have a non-English language completed). We will need a way for user to select their downloaded localised Manual. We can't expect them to delete the bundled English Manual first, and in any case some users (e.g. in a family) could conceivably like to switch between English and other languages. That's unless some kind of flag system (instigated by the localized manual) lets you choose in the local Manual itself.
 * P4? (Enhancement) Script to pull individual language versions.
 * P5? (Enhancement) Change manual wiki to use a style more like Wikipedia for foreign language versions.