Sanford Forte wrote:
Currently, one fo the weaknesses of Wikibooks in regard to K-12 textbook production is lack of a seamless way to get all WYSIWYG to print, and garnering a focus on one project, to prove it can be done.
Cheers, Sanford
I would have to agree that this is a weakness of Wikibooks, even though some efforts along those lines have been done using PDF files to try and make up for some of the short comings of the wiki markup syntax. Part of the problem here is that HTML was never intended to be a WYSIWYG markup language, and the Wiki environment suffers from the same shortcomings in this regard.
The strength of Wikibooks, however, is the collaborative nature of the wiki interface. In spite of those who suggest Wikibooks authors tend to go off onto their own "pet" project and not have any interaction, I have seen a huge degree of collaboration or at least commentary on several "books" that I've worked on within Wikibooks. I will admit that often months or years go by between comments sometimes, but several of the pages I've worked on have had some significant fixes, if even only to correct spelling on a couple of words. The prevailing attitude at the moment on Wikibooks is to get the content put together, and then we will worry about formatting and appearance at a later date.
Some of the Wikijunior books have gone beyond this point to be something where actual formatting has become an issue, but this seems to be a rarity on Wikibooks at the moment... even for "featured books".
From a technical standpoint, I am curious about how we could put into the Wiki markup syntax some features that could be applied to a more standardized formatting system, either borrowing heavily from or even completely adopting LaTeX or some other similar WYSIWYG description language. This to me is the #1 issue that applies to any proposals that attempt to do a Wikisyntax to PDF direct conversion, as the current HTML to PDF approach will IMHO simply look plain ugly. I would not want to even read much less purchase a book that uses the current Wikisyntax converted to HTML, and then have that printed out on paper. Firefox does a valiant job when you try to print a web page onto paper, but it still looks like a very approximate representation and not the medium that the content was originally written to be read.
I have noticed that the FHSST group has tried to move toward something like LaTeX. Compare these two pages:
http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=FHSST_Physics_Units:Unit_Systems&a...
http://www.fhsst.org/?q=node/6872
This is two very different ways to mark up what is supposedly the very same content. I don't see as much coordination between the two versions of this textbook as I would have hoped for, but this does show some alternate ways to do this sort of markup on a text that is currently in use in a formal educational setting, and is Wikibooks related.
There are enough technically minded individuals on Wikibooks that may want to realistically come up with something that perhaps could overcome these barriers. Since we are talking about books here and not encyclopedia articles, what kinds of changes ought to be made to help with the development of actual books that would be along these lines?