[Textbook-l] Textbook style

[Buttay cyril]

Magnus Manske wrote:
> While aimlessly browsing through wikibooks, I suddenly realized that
> our textbooks don't look like - well, textbooks.
>   
Hi,

I agree that the presentation of a wikibook is important, as someone is 
supposed to spend more time on a book than on an article. The problem is 
that I've never found a practical way to display the content of a book 
on a webpage. In my opinion, pdf is better, because the complete book is 
available as a single file (this is better for the user, not for memory 
use!), the layout of the book is fixed by the editor, and the 
typographic quality is (can) far better.

This is why I'm working at improving wiki2pdf , even if it is a slow 
process...
> Perhaps even more significant, out textbooks look like web pages. Even
> the downloadable PDF (screenshot at [1]) looks like a printed web
> page. I don't know what your textbooks look like, but most of mine
> (the better ones, actually) don't resemble a web page sent to the
> printer. Thes have this sidebar, which is not blank like ours, but
> contains important information, like additional figures, notes, and
> keywords for the paragraph they're next to.
>
> I'm not sure if that layout is merely done to make the book longer and
> thus more expensive, but I'd wager there's a good reason behind it. I
> for one find these things useful and welcome our side-scribbling
> overlords.
>   
Sidebar text, notes, keywords are indeed valuable for a book, as they 
tend to "break" the strict layout, and give easy access to some 
important information. I agree that a small set of extension might 
improve this. That would be better than workarounds based on templates.

As far as I'm concerned, what I miss most (even in wikipedia, as I 
haven't contributed to wikibooks yet!) is automatic numbering for 
equations and figures, as well as a way to reference them in the text. I 
can't imagine to write a technical book without these. This is bug 5600 
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5600 .