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_... (e.g. http://dash-of-pepper.com/wikitype?url=http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Open_Sou...).
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!