From Texas Instruments Embedded Processors Wiki

Most people have worked with Mediawiki before so its probably fairly obvious what should & should not go on this wiki.

First & foremost it is a public, collaborative wiki so company-sensitive material should not be posted here.

Some guidelines are listed in the form of Q&A.

Q: Simple question! How do I create a topic?

• A: The easiest way is to use the 'Go' box in the left hand navigation bar. Just type in your topic e.g. "my subject topic" and Mediawiki will let you create that topic presuming that exact topic hasn't already been created.

Note that you have to be logged on before you can create a page. If you're not logged on and try the steps above, you'll just get a "failed to locate that page" error with no option to create it.

Q. What guidelines should I follow when contributing?

Please read the Author Best Practices page for tips.

Q: I wrote a bunch of topic in Twiki markup language, which is different syntactically from Mediawiki. What can I do?

• A: For TI employees, there is a Twiki -> Mediawiki plugin installed - see this link.

Q: I have a bunch of HTML, MS Word and Excel content I'd like to put in Mediawiki format. What can I do?

• A: See this link and this link. There are many similar converters available if you google this.

As an example let's say you have a .doc MS Word file with a few tables etc that you want to turn into Mediawiki format. To do this you could install Word2MediaWikiPlus. Essentially:
1. Download the latest Word2MediaWikiPlus version. Save the zip file anywhere.

2. Open up Word2MediaWikiPlus_Installer.doc, enable Macros. Follow the instructions and click Install or Update Macro

3. After some simple configuration this will give you a Convert To Wiki button. Open up your Word doc and click this button. This will go thru the article and convert it to Mediawiki format.

4. Select the whole article (CTRL-A), copy it (CTRL-C), and paste it into a Mediawiki article (CTRL-V). Done. Note that you probably dont want to save the converted .doc file directly in Word since it converts it "in-place". Just save it in the wiki directly.

• A: Additionally, you can install the following macro, Excel2Wiki.zip, into MS Excel and it will create a Wikitext version of the chart for you to paste into your Wiki page.

Instructions to install and use this macro are as follows:

1. Copy this file into your Program Files -> Microsoft Office -> Office11 folder.

2. Then in Excel, go to Tools -> Macro -> Visual Basic Editor

3. Right click on any of the blank area in the “Project – VBAProject” window on the left side and choose "Import file". The Excel2Wiki.bas file should be available in the default directory that opens up.

4. To run the Macro, go back to your table in the Excel file and highlight all the cells that you wish to convert to wiki format.

5. After highlighting, go to Tools -> Macro -> Macros and select “format as wiki table” and click "run".

6. The table should be completely converted preserving most, if not all, formatting and colors.

Q: What file types can I upload?

• A: Most of the key read-only file types are supported. For example if you have a Powerpoint Presentation, you must first convert it to PDF (using one of the many converters available), before uploading it. Options here include: -
  • pdf995. Free. Allows you to create PDF files by simply selecting the "print" command from any application
  • Adobe Standard. Not free but is able to convert and preserve embedded URL links in a .ppt (or .doc) when converted to a .pdf file.

Q: What's the limit on file size uploads?

• A: 5Mb. This wiki is not intended to be a repository for code! Split up presentation-PDFSs etc to keep size down.

Q: Can I upload code?

• A: Yes...however see above! Sample code can be attached as tar.gz or zip files.

Products should not be uploaded on the wiki; instead you should link to a product release website. This wiki is not intended to be a software distribution channel, but can be used to provide links to products and other reference material.

Q: Can I create a topic off-line then post it once I'm happy with it?

• A: Sure. We use this offline Mediawiki Editor. It works quite well.

Q: Can I associate my wiki topic with a bunch of categories?

• A: Sure. At the bottom of your wiki page just list out multiple categories - the same topic will then show up in each of them - simple! See this page for an example of how to do this

Just add at the bottom e.g.

[[Category : DVEVM]]
[[Category : Codec Engine]]

Please check that the categories exist and are spelled correctly when doing this. You can see the complete list of categories via Special:Categories. As per additional FAQs in this Wiki FAQ please do not arbitrarily create too many categories.

Q: Can I find out if my topic is popular?

• A: Yes. See Special:Popularpages

Q. When I create a page, how can I be sure nobody already created a similar topic?

• A: When u create a topic and click 'Go' Mediawiki will also show similar topics. By default the 'Main' namespace is enabled - this encompasses all the Categories within the wiki. So you can be sure that all categories & topics have been searched before you make a new page.

Q. How do I create new categories?

• A: See e.g. this link. In a nutshell add at the end of your topic...

[[Category:Category name]]

Then click on that Category name - add some basic text e.g. This category contains information about Category name and then Save it. Done! Now users can bookmark that specific category page and all articles referencing that category will automatically show up.

The CCSv4 Category is a nice example. At the top it has a nice intro and then at the bottom you automatically see all the topics listed that have been tagged with this category.

• NOTE - we are trying to keep the number of top-level categories to a minimum. For example, if new devices within a family come out it is too painful to retrofit 100s of topics to add that new category. Hence efforts are being made to keep top-level topics fairly generic. Subcategories are Ok e.g. see Category:Cplusplus. To make a subcategory simply add this at the bottom of the subcategory page.

[[Category:Parent Category name]]

Q. How do I spell check my wiki post?

In Internet Explorer, install the Google Toolbar then use Check -> Autofix

In Firefox the spellchecker is built-in.

Q. I don't like the WYSIWYG editor. How do I change back?

We installed a WYSIWYG editor called FCKEditor based on user demand. However 'power-users' often prefer to stick to standard mediawiki syntax with the help of the Extended Edit Buttons toolbar.

By default the WYSIWYG editor is off. However that only works for new users. It is more difficult to change the preferences for existing users. We are evaluating SQL methods to achieve this but it may take some time.

In the meantime you can easily flip back to using the standard edit buttons via: -

my preferences -> Misc

And then check the following boxes...

Q. How do I syntax highlight code examples?

We have installed the Geshi engine extension that feeds the syntax highlight capability. You can see the list of extensions installed here.

Some examples: -

• Javascript - <code lang='javascript'>

// add remote codecs from the DSP server to the engine
var Engine = xdc.useModule('ti.sdo.ce.Engine');
var myEngine = Engine.createFromServer(
 "video_copy", // Engine name (as referred to in the C app)
 "./video_copy.x64P", // path to server exe, relative to its package dir
 "ti.sdo.ce.examples.servers.video_copy.evmDM6446" // server package
 );

• C code - <code lang='c'>

/* EDMA register address and definitions */
#define CCNT *((volatile unsigned int *)(PARAMENTRY0 + 0x1C))
 
/* Allocate srcBuff and dstBuff. Do a cache flush and cache invalidate,if required. */
static signed char srcBuff[512];
static signed char dstBuff[512];
 
/* Step 1: EDMA initialization */
QUEPRI=0x10;
QWMTHRA =(16<<8u)|(16 & 0xFF);

See the complete list of extensions here.

Q. What is the policy on "promotional material"?

The wiki is for technical, collaborative information. It is not intended to be a platform to aggressively promote particular 3rd party tool features. Please ensure topics on 3rd party commerical offerings are objective, presenting only the technical details and referring users to other websites for pricing and sales information.

Q. I want multiple search terms to point to the same place. How do I do this?

Consider redirects. For example if you type in xds 100 in the standard search box it redirects you to the XDS100 wiki topic.

This is achieved (on the xds 100 wiki page) as follows: -

#REDIRECT [[XDS100]]

Q. How do I give feedback about a topic, or ask a question?

Wiki is primarily a 1-way information mechanism, however you can give feedback on topics by using the Discussion tab. The author (and everybody else) will typically see the feedback via their RSS feed. Please do not expect the topic to be modified to instantly address any questions posted on a Discussion. Authors should do their best to respond/apply feedback.

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