Andrew Whitworth wrote:
I have Adobe Acrobat Pro, so when I've done PDFs in the past I use that and the results are typically very good and very accurate. i know that most other people don't have access to it (I only have a license through school). The PDF generator on the toolserver is a great idea, and though there are some problems, I thnk it's a great start. A few points/retorts:
Do we need stable versions. I don't really see the need. Perhaps someone could give examples of stable books that have deteriorated due to the ease of editing.
It has nothing to do with deterioration over time, it has more to do with the stable dependability that teachers and students will depend on over a semester. A teacher needs to be able to say "The homework is on page 95", and have all the faith in the world that page 95 today is the same as page 95 tomorrow. With that said, "stable versions" is basically a misnomer, because they aren't stable in a general sense, only with respect to a particular audience. That is, we could get a request that says "i'm teaching X class, and i want Y book to be stable for the duration of the semester." We could then create a stabilized version of that book for use in the class, while continuing to develop the book on the wiki in the background.
<*snip*>
I like the method we have now, where books have printable versions (on wiki) and PDF versions. If we also had stable versions (especially if we had a tool for automagically creating such versions without requiring lots of copying, page protecting, etc), that would just be a bonus. In short: we should have many methods.
--Andrew whitworth
This is a general comment about "automated" PDF files that are created with something like the toolserver. While I am not necessarily against somebody spending the effort trying to make an automated process directly from the MediaWiki database of Wikibooks, I would have to consider any such effort created in this manner to be nothing more than a rough draft, and a considerable amount of additional effort would have to be done in order to create something that is book-like.
More explicit and to the point, anything that is automated from a bunch of web pages is simply going to be ugly. Now I admit this is subjective, but web pages simply aren't books, as hard as you try. Wikibooks via a simple web interface is an important first step, and it does get us to gather the raw content which can be transformed into a book, but it is only about half-way to the goal of publishing a textbook even when you have some beautiful web pages and the written content is letter-perfect.
So far, there isn't anything on Wikibooks resembling what professional editors do in commercial publishing circles. About the best example I've seen anywhere on a large-scale volunteer project is what the Distributed Proofreaders do with the Gutenberg Project draft texts, where there is a completely separate team of volunteers who review the formatting of the document after the actual grammar of the text has been been considered in the final form.
I'd also challenge that a book, a really good book, is in many ways a work of art unto itself. Particularly a good textbook. If we want to make textbooks that really revolutionize the publishing industry, and have them used in actual classrooms, we need to treat them as art forms and not something which massive shortcuts have been taken.
Is it possible to also include the unique book-only markup tags within the Wiki as well? Yes, and I'll admit that. But it isn't going to be easy to get going either. I expect that a development team working very closely with Wikibooks participants to generate a very good combination of markup tags for book publishing that would generate quality PDF files will take years if not a full decade to perfect. On this I am staking my experience and knowledge of software development cycles I've gained over several decades of writing computer software, and years of being involved with Wikibooks.
By far and away the current best "free" method of generating a PDF file is to import the text into Open Office, formatting the content to be much more book-like, and exporting the PDF file. Acrobat Pro certainly does better (Adobe wrote the spec, so they understand it better), but as you said, not everybody on Wikibooks can afford that software.
-- Robert Horning