Topic on Project:Support desk

I'm trying to get a PDF, or ideally ODT, output from my fairly extensive Mediawiki wiki. The wiki is hosted on a remote server, not locally, and it is not publicly accessible -- only someone with an account (i.e., me) can see it. How do I get PDF or ODT output?

Things I've already tried, and why they (seemingly) don't work:

• mediawiki2latex seems to require public, automatic creation of an account to work. There seems to be no way to specify a particular account/password to log in to the wiki, so either I make the wiki open to spammers or I can't use that app.
• The readme for Extension:Collectionstates

  SECURITY NOTICE: If the MediaWiki and the render server communicate over an insecure channel (for example on an unencrypted channel over the internet), please DO NOT USE THIS SETTING, as the credentials will be exposed to eavesdropping!

  So that seems to imply that I shouldn't use it to output files from my wiki to some public render server.
• My webspace provider can't set up a render server there.
• Setting up my own render server locally seems to still require an IP address, and apparently that can't be 127.0.0.1:

  Please note that nserve does not allow you to have your mediawiki base_url (equivalent to $wgServer in LocalSettings.php) set to localhost or an IP beginning with 127.0. or 192.168.

  Or is there some way to specify a different IP there? What would that IP address be?

I'm sure there's something I'm not understanding somewhere. It can't really be that hard to output PDF from a privacy-controlled Mediawiki wiki, can it?

I myself use the Extension:Collection to have PDFs created and I think it can also provide ODT files.

With its default settings, this extension uses a render server, which is provided by some company and the extension will then send your page content there, meaning: Over the internet. If that is not what you want, in order to be able to use this extension, you would have to set up a rendering server yourself (which I have not tried, but which might not be trivial and which surely needs changes in the host server).

mediawiki2latex requires to wiki to be publicly readable. But an account or possibility to create one is not needed. Still it has already been requested that mediawiki2latex should support working with accounts. I am not going to prevent that from happening, and the software is open source, so you are welcome to implement such a feature, and provide a patch.