[Textbook-l] News about PDF generation

[j.w. thomas]

Robert Arustamyan wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> We've released new version of our wikibooks pdf generating tool. Now it 
> is named wikitype and has moved to http://dash-of-pepper.com/wikitype
> 
> New features:
> -- posibility to choose chapters
> -- gfdl license at the end of each book
> -- direct links to generate books like 
> http://dash-of-pepper.com/wikitype?url=http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Name_Of_The_Book 
> (e.g. 
> http://dash-of-pepper.com/wikitype?url=http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Source). 
> 
> 
> If noone minds we can attach some well-formatted PDFs, like Knowing 
> Knoppix ( 
> http://dash-of-pepper.com/wikitype/pdf-of-the-day/Knowing_Knoppix.pdf ), 
> to wikibooks.org books and we would be glad if the authors do the same.
> 
> 
> Looking forward to receive your feedbacks and comments.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Robert

Hi Robert,

I am so far very impressed with wikitype.  But there are some issues 
with "my" book (Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book) that might interest you.

First, this book is huge.  I have not yet successfully generated a PDF 
of the whole thing using wikitype.  It has a three-level hierarchy, and 
in retrospect, perhaps it should have been nine books instead of one.

But I really wanted to see what wikitype could do, so I scaled back my 
ambitions, and selected one of the nine sections.  Still pretty big, and 
it didn't seem to work either (I gave it a couple of hours, but it never 
came back with a "Get PDF" button.  So I scaled back the ambitions a 
little more, and went for a single chapter of one of the sub books (I 
choose "Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book/Nature/Sand" - not because it 
is a great chapter, but because it is fairly small.  That worked great!

But I did notice a few problems.  Every chapter in this book uses 
Template:Honor_header, which uses tables with colspan specified as 
something other than 1.  That seems to be a tad broken.  A lot of the 
chapters also use Template:Species_id which suffers from the same problem.

But man... this really is a great tool, and I will be busily generating 
PDF's of individual chapters (or small collections of them) in the near 
future.  When it can handle the whole book, I will generate one of those 
too (or perhaps nine - one for each major section).

Suggested feature - Octavo or Folio printing:
A couple of months ago I printed off seven chapters and folded them into 
a book.  I reduced each page with a photocopier so that I could fit four 
pages on the front and four more on the back of each sheet of paper. 
Then I folded each sheet in half twice, nested the whole mess, and 
stapled it together.  I had to print some of pages upside-down so that 
they would be right-side up when folded.  This actually has a name - 
octavo - in the printing business, and there's a Wikibook called "Zine 
Making" that covers this in some detail.  Getting all of this right took 
several hours, as page one was on the opposite side of the page from 
page 72.  It might be easier to support folio (folded once rather than 
twice, so you end up with four pages per sheet of paper), but Octavo is 
nice too (if you want a small book or if you're using 11"x17" paper).

Thought you'd like some feedback.  Once again, I cannot praise wikitype 
highly enough!

-- 
Jim Thomas            Principal Applications Engineer  Bittware, Inc
jthomas at bittware.com  http://www.bittware.com    (603) 226-0404 x536
A great mind thinks alike.