# MediaWiki Formats

/@WIKIEXTENSIONID@/wikiformats.xhp
MediaWiki Formats
The following list gives an overview of the text formats that the @WIKIEXTENSIONPRODUCTNAME@ can upload to the Wiki server.
The OpenDocument format used by Writer and the WikiMedia format are quite different. Only a subset of all features can be transformed from one format to the other.
Headings
Apply a heading paragraph style to the headings in your Writer document. The Wiki will show the heading styles of the same outline level, formatted as defined by the Wiki engine.
Hyperlinks
Native OpenDocument hyperlinks are transformed into "external" Wiki links. Therefore, the built-in linking facility of OpenDocument should only be used to create links that point to other sites outside the Wiki web. For creating Wiki links that point to other subjects of the same Wiki domain, use Wiki links.
Lists
Lists can reliably be exported when the whole list uses a consistent list style. Use the Numbering or Bullets icon to generate a list in Writer. If you need a list without numbering or bullets, use Format - Bullets and Numbering to define and apply the respective list style.
Paragraphs
Alignment
Explicit text alignment should not be used in Wiki articles. Nevertheless, text alignment is supported for left, centered, and right alignment of text.
Pre-formatted text
A paragraph style with a fixed-width font is transformed as pre-formatted text. Pre-formatted text is shown on the Wiki with a border around the text.
Character styles
Character styles modify the appearance of parts of a paragraph. The transformation supports bold, italics, bold/italics, subscript and superscript. All fixed width fonts are transformed into the Wiki typewriter style.
Footnotes
Note: The transformation uses the new style of footnotes with <ref> and <references> tags that requires the Cite.php extension to be installed into MediaWiki. If those tags occur as plain text in the transformation result, ask the Wiki administrator to install this extension.
Images
Images cannot be exported by a transformation producing a single file of Wiki text. However, if the image is already uploaded to the target Wiki domain (e. g. WikiMedia Commons), then the transformation produces a valid image tag that includes the image. Image captions are also supported.
Tables
Simple tables are supported well. Table headers are translated into corresponding Wiki style table headers. However, custom formatting of table borders, column sizes and background colors is ignored.
Joined Cells
OpenDocument and especially OpenOffice.org represent tables that have joined cells that span rows as tables with nested tables. In contrast, the wiki model of table is to declare column and row spans for such joined cells.
If only columns of the same row are joined, the result of the transformation resembles the source document very well.
Borders
Irrespective of custom table styles for border and background, a table is always exported as "prettytable", which renders in the Wiki engine with simple borders and bold header.
Charset and special characters
The charset of the transformation result is fixed to UTF-8. Depending on your system, this might not be the default charset. This might cause "special characters" to look broken when viewed with default settings. However, you can switch your editor to UTF-8 encoding to fix this. If your editor does not support switching the encoding, you can display the result of the transformation in the Firefox browser and switch the encoding to UTF-8 there. Now, you can cut and paste the transformation result to your program of choice.