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