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&…
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?