Libre Pathology news:Offline version of Libre Pathology
An offline version of Libre Pathology, based on Kiwix, is in the works.
Giving you the whole site - so you can put it on your smart phone or tablet - is our goal. We see it as part of our commitment to libre (free), as is in our name Libre Pathology.
We hope to make the offline version available soon to everyone, so that Libre Pathology can be a source of pathology information for those that do not have an internet connection or a less than optimal one.
At the moment we're still ironing out some issues. If you want to help or just try the pre-release (beta) version, get in touch with our site admin.
User experience
Kiwix has a strong built-in search feature, and navigation otherwise is similar to online. The hyperlinks work.
Setting up an offline version of Libre Pathology
- Install Kiwix - takes less than 5 minutes.
- Download the Libre Pathology ZIM file - takes a while as it is ~700MB... ask our site admin for the link & password to get the pre-release.
- Open Kiwix and load the ZIM file - takes less than 2 minutes.
- Enjoy Libre Pathology offline!
Technical details
The offline version is based on Kiwix, which was developed to create offline versions of WikiMedia Foundation projects, e.g. Wikipedia, Wikiversity.
Currently, we are using httrack to generate the static HTML pages from an offline copy of the site, and then feed that to zimwriterfs to make the ZIM file. We are looking at using Parsoid/MWoffliner for the HTML generation.
The image size was limited to make the ZIM file more compact. The full resolution images are available on Libre Pathology and WikiCommons.
Acknowledgements
A big thanks go to Dr. Vinita Parkash (who inspired the effort), and Dr. Emily Patonay and Dr. Jens Schittenhelm for testing.
Special thanks go to Emmanuel Engelhart who made this all possible. He did all the heavy lifting in this project; he developed Kiwix!