Offline tools

Amusewiki stores its files in a plain text lightweight format called Emacs Muse (actually a dialect of it) and described in depth in the manual. Such files are always listed in the infobox with the downloads and are labelled as “plain text source” and have a .muse extension. The same file is also bundled in the .zip, which also gives you the eventual attachments.

The format is not couple with the web application, and you can produce PDF, EPUB, HTML files from Muse files locally.

Installation

The tools are written in Perl. Every GNU/Linux operating system comes with Perl installed. They are supposed to work on Mac and Windows too, but you have to find your way to get Perl installed (together with a way to install modules from CPAN, the repository of Perl code, usually the program called App::cpanminus, which is invoked with the command cpanm).

Also, if you want (and you probably want) to produce PDF, you need the installation of a recent TeX Live distribution.

Debian and Ubuntu

The parser, the compiler and the preprocessor are packaged for Debian. So you could do:

# add the key
wget -O - https://packages.amusewiki.org/amusewiki.gpg.key | apt-key add -
# add a source list entry
echo 'deb http://packages.amusewiki.org/debian jessie main' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/amusewiki.list
# install the tools
apt-get install libtext-amuse-perl libtext-amuse-preprocessor-perl libtext-amuse-compile-perl

TeX Live will be pulled in as dependency.

Manually

Install TeX Live following the instructions in the TeX Live homepage.

Install the Perl modules from CPAN:

cpanm Text::Amuse::Compile Text::Amuse::Preprocessor

Usage

One way or another, you should have the executable files muse-compile.pl and muse-preprocessor.pl installed.

which muse-preprocessor.pl                                                                     │
# /usr/bin/muse-preprocessor.pl
which muse-compile.pl
# /usr/bin/muse-compile.pl

Typical usage:

# download the manual to use as sample. Please note the .zip
# extension, so we get the attachments as well.
wget https://amusewiki.org/library/manual.zip
unzip manual.zip
cd manual
muse-compile.pl --help --verbose
muse-compile.pl --html --epub --pdf manual.muse

This command will produce HTML, EPUB and PDF files.

See muse-compile.pl --help --verbose for the full list.

The preprocessor is used if you need to cleanup your document. It has the same options present in the editing amusewiki page.

muse-preprocessor.pl --help
muse-preprocessor.pl --inplace --show-nbsp --typography \
                     --links --footnotes manual.muse

See also Working with footnotes for an in-depth explanation of the --footnotes switch.

The preprocessor can also convert HTML pages to muse.

html-to-muse.pl https://packages.amusewiki.org/

See also Pandoc for the same functionality. Additionally, with Pandoc you can import/export Muse files from and to a very wide range of formats.