You may have many documents that you would like to use a local program to format in a format Pm Wiki can display.
You could open each document and copy/paste the content to new pmwiki pages or you could format the document in advance and upload it using a FTP client.
Only two lines are necessary in a Pm Wiki page file:
version=pmwiki-2.1.0 urlencoded=1 text=Markup text
"version=" tells Pm Wiki that the values are urlencoded. The actual value doesn't matter, as long as "urlencoded=1" appears somewhere in the line.
"text=" needs to have the markup text with newlines converted to "%0a" and percent signs converted to "%25".
In order to let the (:pagelist :) markup work, make sure the filename begins with an uppercase letter.
In order to have the (:pagelist link= ... :) markup on other pages list this page, a third attribute is required:
targets=GroupName1.Pagename1,GroupName2.Pagename2,...
"targets=" is a comma delimited list of all links from the current page.
Keys you could see in a raw Pm Wiki file:
Main.WikiSandbox)
(:title The Page Title:).
upgrades.php (only on SiteAdmin.Status)
Below these you will see information used to keep track of the page's revision history.
A simple way to create a wikipage file to use for distribution (for example with a recipe or a skin) is to create the page with Pm Wiki and then use a text editor to delete all lines but version, text, and ctime. Example:
version=pmwiki-2.1.0 ordered=1 urlencoded=1 text=This is a line.%0aThis is another. ctime=1142030000
Inside of a page file, Pm Wiki stores the latest version of the markup text, and uses this to render the page. The page history is kept as a sequence of differences between the latest version of the page and each previous version.
Pm Wiki normally puts the page history at the end of each page file in reverse chronological sequence, and sets the "ordered=1" items in the header. If an operation needs only the most recent version of a page, then Pm Wiki will stop reading and processing a page file at the point where the history begins, potentially saving a lot of time and memory. If the "ordered=1" flag isn't present, Pm Wiki makes no assumptions about the ordering of items in the pagefile and processes the entire file.
The following unix script (tested on Mac OSX?) will extract and decode the current text from a wiki file:
#!/bin/tcsh
# wtext - extract wiki text
#
# wtext wikifile > output
set fn = "$1"
if ("$fn" == "") then
echo "need input file parameter"
exit 999
endif
if (! -f $fn) then
echo "$fn does not exist"
exit 999
endif
rm sedin.$$ >& /dev/null
set ch = `grep ^newline= $fn | cut -d= -f2`
if ("$ch" == "") set ch = "%0a"
cat <<eof > sedin.$$
s/^text=//
s/$ch/\
/g
s/%3c/</g
s/%25/%/g
eof
grep "^text=" "$1" | sed -f sedin.$$
rm sedin.$$ >& /dev/null