WordPress to LaTeX Hack

This post is obsolete. Look here for details on converting WordPress to LaTeX.

I have stumbled on another coding nuisance. Last weekend I spent a few moments exploring ways to export and print this blog in a nice typeset fashion. I first tried Blurb’s book making software. It has a nice feature that automatically downloads blog posts and formats them as ready to print books. Sounds great ehh?  Download your precious blog rants, press a few buttons, generate a slick PDF, upload it to a site like Lulu and then wait a few days for your blog to appear in hardcover.  As usual the devil is in the details.

Blurb’s book making software makes a mess of:

1. Any  LaTeX inclusions. All LaTeX code is echoed verbatim as ASCII.  I suppose we should be grateful that it’s not deleted.
2. Source code listings are mangled beyond repair.  Your elegantly formatted code comes out worse than HEX dumps.
3. Embedded images are improperly placed.  When it comes to blogs restricting image inclusions to simple center of the page layouts pays big dividends.  Wrapping text around images may look ok on your blog but RSS software like Google Reader will wreck it.  Apparently simple center of the page layouts is too much for Blurb.  The default layout stuffs square thumbnails in the margins:  arghhhh……
4. Web Links are inserted as verbatim footnotes at the end of each posting.  The link footnotes often sprawl onto extra pages that have only one or two lines.  I can see why book publishers might not care about efficient page allocation ($$$) but I certainly do.

After hitting all these shortcomings on my first test I abandoned Blurb and started searching for ways to export WordPress blogs as LaTeX.  There are a number of  useful tools for converting LaTeX to WordPress. Some of these tools are used by Fields Medal winners: see Terence Tao’s blog.   Unfortunately going the other way does not appear to be well supported.  Damn!

After failing to come up with an acceptable WordPress to LaTeX freebie I downloaded this blog in WordPress’s XML export format and took a look.  To my surprise WordPress XML is what I call good XML.  Good XML is designed to be read and understood by human beings!  This contrasts with bad XML.  Bad XML is essentially a binary format that some idiot decided should be rendered as XML.  Bad XML is useful when you want to slow down computers.

Converting WordPress XML to LaTeX looks simple enough to make a nice C# coding exercise.  When I have hacked up a converter that panders to my idiosyncratic tastes I will post the source code.