What about simple transclusion? [1] Example of first few handbook-chapters
at [2]
It's not pretty (the top TOC works, but the inline-toc on the
right-hand-side doesn't work) That could be prevented with some <noinclude>
directives on the source pages but I didn't want to trample over Sven.
Would that work? (And yes - a few other includes are broken because this is
rooted in my user-space and not under the handbook, but I think these
should work if a page of this type was included in the Handbook namespace.)

Cheers,
malc.

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Transclusion
[2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Mlashley

On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 3:19 PM, Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@gentoo.org>
wrote:

> On Sun, 14 Dec 2014 10:02:36 -0500 Jeff Horelick wrote:
> > > > In such cases I would recommend a Live USB (or CD/DVD) that has a
> > > > graphical environment, so that the user can keep a modern web browser
> > > > next to a terminal window, to ease installation. In that case the
> wiki
> > > > is perfectly usable.
> > >
> > > No, this is not a solution, because on particular hardware live
> > > media (live usb/cd/dvd/whatever) may fail with video or gui support.
> > >
> > > I had such problem this year, when I had to install Gentoo from
> > > LiveCD without ability to use any other host for support (reading
> > > howtos, googling and so on). I used SystemRescueCD because of ample
> > > set of debug, admin and analysis tools I needed to configure
> > > system properly, but GUI was just a failure due to lack of nvidia
> > > drivers out of the box. Of course, I can easily fix such issues
> > > when fresh system is installed, but while it was being installed I
> > > had to use what is available from the live media. And elinks was a
> > > great help back there.
> > >
> > > So it will be really nice to keep handbook copies outside of wiki
> > > interface. Probably a reasonable compromise will be to keep
> > > handbooks at the wiki, but to use some script to generate simpler
> > > htmls for out of the wiki usage scope.
> > >
> > > Best regards,
> > > Andrew Savchenko
> > >
> >
> >
> > I feel like we do not need to optimize for this case really. I feel that
> > the odds of installing Gentoo where you have no GUI (via either the
> LiveDVD
> > or SystemRescueCD), no smartphone to use to look at the wiki, no tablet
> to
> > use to look at the wiki (I'm not sure about elsewhere, but here in the
> US,
> > you can get a brand-new Android tablet for $40 USD at a physical store
> > (less online) and in the UK you can find them under 50GBP), no spare
> > computers to use to look at the wiki are extremely unlikely.
>
> This case was really simple: use of any electronic devices aside
> from PC in question was prohibited due to company's security
> policies. In fact this is quite common case when we're talking
> about business setups and not private workstations.
>
> Also I'd like to note that smartphone is not solution for people
> without perfect eyesight (e.g. me): reading too much text from small
> screen is either painful (with small fonts) or inconvenient (with
> large ones).
>
> Please note I'm not saying "do not put handbooks in wiki" — this
> is really a good idea to have all docs in one place; I'm talking
> about some backup solution for such cases, like simple generated
> htmls.
>
> Best regards,
> Andrew Savchenko
>