First off, I've seen some of the new software changes on the wiki, and they look great. As promised, I got my first book today, and I'm racing through it to come up with feedback for the PediaPress people. I have lots and lots of feedback already, most of it is not urgent or anything and some of it is going to be difficult to implement because it's sort of wikibooks-specific. Having a robust set of configuration options that can be set on the wiki would help alleviate a lot of these things without having to tie the extension to any single wiki.
1) On the table of contents, it says "Articles", when that word really doesn't mean anything for books. The first heading that says "Articles" should either be changed to the name of the book or should be removed entirely. Actually, you could probably read the value from [[MediaWiki:Article]] to make this solution portable. 2) Subpages shouldn't be prepended with the name of the book. For instance, the chapter should just be titled "CHAPTERNAME", not "BOOKNAME/CHAPTERNAME". Maybe we could have a way to override the displayed name of a chapter, which would make good sense for books where technical difficulties prevent the name from being displayed properly on the wiki. 3) On page "ii" it should probably contain the name of the wiki where the PDF was generated, and a link. Maybe also some kind of note that the "authors" are volunteers at the project, and that the name on the front of the book is an editor, not the "author" of it. 4) On the cover, the editors name should be marked with "edited by" or "Editor." or something so people know it isn't an author. On Page "i", it should say "Written by the volunteers at project X, edited by Y". Or something like that. 5) I like the way external hyperlinks are put into footnotes. Maybe we could have something like a special <footnote> tag, or a <div class="footnote"> or something that would allow writers to put certain notes in the page footer. This would be a great substitution for some of the messagebox templates that act like footnotes on the wiki. 6) Math formulas are generally very well rendered and handled, although integrals, limits and summations seem to be a bit cramped. 7) "articles" should each begin on a new page (I'm using the word "article" here so as not to be confused with the collections concepts of "chapter" and "page"). 8) Chapter headings should probably be on their own page, not just as a bigger heading before the next chapter heading. 9) I would love it if authors could specify some kind of "print name", such as in their preferences. That way people could be recognized by their real names if they choose, instead of by their on-wiki screennames. 10) Some images look very pixelated and fuzzy. What kind of compression is used? Can it be improved? 11) I'm sort of surprised that PediaPress doesn't post some kind of disclaimer here somewhere. Like "PediaPress and it's affiliates aren't responsible for the content of this book...". I'm even thinking that [[Wikibooks:General Disclaimer]] should become a permanent part of these books (But I want to see what people like Mike Godwin say about it first before I go on a crusade about it).
This is about it for now. Most of my other nitpicks have to do with formatting issues that we can fix by overriding templates, so I won't mention them here.
--Andrew Whitworth
On Thu, 13 Nov 2008 18:54:01 -0500, "Andrew Whitworth" wknight8111@gmail.com said: [...]
- On the table of contents, it says "Articles", when that word really
doesn't mean anything for books. The first heading that says "Articles" should either be changed to the name of the book or should be removed entirely. Actually, you could probably read the value from [[MediaWiki:Article]] to make this solution portable.
Good call. -> http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/ticket/356
- Subpages shouldn't be prepended with the name of the book. For
instance, the chapter should just be titled "CHAPTERNAME", not "BOOKNAME/CHAPTERNAME". Maybe we could have a way to override the displayed name of a chapter, which would make good sense for books where technical difficulties prevent the name from being displayed properly on the wiki.
Requested: http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/ticket/355
- Math formulas are generally very well rendered and handled,
although integrals, limits and summations seem to be a bit cramped.
This should probably use the same renderer as we use for math images. Not sure why it wouldn't do so. Haven't added a bug for this as it's not clear to me what's going on or what needs to change.
- I would love it if authors could specify some kind of "print name",
such as in their preferences. That way people could be recognized by their real names if they choose, instead of by their on-wiki screennames.
We could request $wgAllowRealName to be enabled - then Collections could access that for attribution where provided. Probably that's a good idea - users don't have to provide a real name, and we should allow everyone who wishes to do so to provide a name for attribution.
-Mike
---- Mike.lifeguard mikelifeguard@fastmail.fm
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 9:48 PM, Mike.lifeguard mikelifeguard@fastmail.fm wrote: [...]
Good call. -> http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/ticket/356
[...]
Requested: http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/ticket/355
Thanks mike! I should have opened tickets myself, but I really wanted to post the feedback to the list first so I could get some feedback on my feedback, and maybe some suggestions.
- Math formulas are generally very well rendered and handled,
although integrals, limits and summations seem to be a bit cramped.
This should probably use the same renderer as we use for math images. Not sure why it wouldn't do so. Haven't added a bug for this as it's not clear to me what's going on or what needs to change.
It looks to me (and I could definitely be wrong) like it's using the "HTML if possible" rendering option, probably to save bandwidth on the conversion server.
- I would love it if authors could specify some kind of "print name",
such as in their preferences. That way people could be recognized by their real names if they choose, instead of by their on-wiki screennames.
We could request $wgAllowRealName to be enabled - then Collections could access that for attribution where provided. Probably that's a good idea
- users don't have to provide a real name, and we should allow everyone
who wishes to do so to provide a name for attribution.
This sounds like a great solution, and I didn't even realize it was an option. There are a lot of editors, myself included, who would like to use real names more often. I like having the pseudonym as well for a variety of reasons, but being able to post my real name for things like published books would be a great thing. It beats having to explain to people I show the books off to that "Yeah, in this book I'm listed at Whiteknight instead of by my real name", and trying to explain why that is. Maybe we should ask the higher-ups whether this is even an option (privacy concerns might scuttle this ship before we even leave port).
--Andrew Whitworth
Andrew Whitworth wrote:
- Math formulas are generally very well rendered and handled,
although integrals, limits and summations seem to be a bit cramped.
This should probably use the same renderer as we use for math images. Not sure why it wouldn't do so. Haven't added a bug for this as it's not clear to me what's going on or what needs to change.
It looks to me (and I could definitely be wrong) like it's using the "HTML if possible" rendering option, probably to save bandwidth on the conversion server.
Thanks for pointing out that issue.
For the book version formulas are rendered with latex, just as the Mediawiki does it. But there was one difference though, we always used the "math" (latex) environment. For formulas that appear on their own line we are now using the "displaymath" environment that does not cramp the formulas in the way you have seen it. --> Formulas should now look even nicer ;)
I fixed this in the latex-writer (books), the downloadable pdf version already did the right thing.
On Nov 14, 2008, at 12:54 AM, Andrew Whitworth wrote:
- On page "ii" it should probably contain the name of the wiki where
the PDF was generated, and a link. Maybe also some kind of note that the "authors" are volunteers at the project, and that the name on the front of the book is an editor, not the "author" of it. 4) On the cover, the editors name should be marked with "edited by" or "Editor." or something so people know it isn't an author. On Page "i", it should say "Written by the volunteers at project X, edited by Y". Or something like that.
At least there should be some way to set an editor within a collection and to transmit this to pediapress. This allows for a sensible default value if people order existing collections.
- I like the way external hyperlinks are put into footnotes. Maybe we
could have something like a special <footnote> tag, or a <div class="footnote"> or something that would allow writers to put certain notes in the page footer. This would be a great substitution for some of the messagebox templates that act like footnotes on the wiki.
Maybe we should support to handle Ref/Note that way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Ref/doc
- Math formulas are generally very well rendered and handled,
although integrals, limits and summations seem to be a bit cramped.
Can you give us an example of this. Usually those formulas should look good, except for rare cases where they get too long and we need to scale them.
- "articles" should each begin on a new page (I'm using the word
"article" here so as not to be confused with the collections concepts of "chapter" and "page").
I am confused. article == module != wiki-page ?
- Chapter headings should probably be on their own page, not just as
a bigger heading before the next chapter heading.
Chapters always start on top of the next right-hand page. I think this fairly common.
- Some images look very pixelated and fuzzy. What kind of
compression is used? Can it be improved?
We are using the highest resolution available for images. If there is only a low-res version of images this may result in pixilated images in printed books (600 DPI vs. 90 DPI of displays). A solution would be to scale the image to lower dimensions but that would be seen as a bug also.
- I'm sort of surprised that PediaPress doesn't post some kind of
disclaimer here somewhere. Like "PediaPress and it's affiliates aren't responsible for the content of this book...". I'm even thinking that [[Wikibooks:General Disclaimer]] should become a permanent part of these books (But I want to see what people like Mike Godwin say about it first before I go on a crusade about it).
Above is true for books that are published. Otherwise we are rather acting like a "kodak-printing-service", assuming that users are knowing what they do and where the content is derived from. For existing collections this somewhere in between though.
Heiko
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