[Wikiversity-l] Beta-testing of PDF functionality

[Cormac Lawler]

On 12/22/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi -
>
> for the last few days, we've been testing the new wiki-to-print
> functionality on WikiEducator.org. If you haven't already, give it a
> spin: if all goes well, this functionality will soon find its way into
> Wikimedia projects.


This is a great feature - thanks to all involved for making it
possible. I especially like the ability to save collections both for
yourself and for anyone else - this is really excellent. :-) Some
comments on my brief trial so far...

All pages in a collection start directly after the other - is there
any way of starting a new page from the wiki on a new page in the pdf
(apart from using chapters)?

Creating chapters seemed to be hit and miss - I tried adding a chapter
with different numbers of pages and in different places but it
sometimes worked with one setup and not with another where the only
differences were the individual pages I had selected - keeping
structure constant. (When it "didn't work", I got an error message
after trying to download the pdf file).

The attribution message at the end of the pdf file - and on the bottom
of each page - is generic, and doesn't specify where the page is (at
least to someone not familiar with page naming on a wiki). This might
mean simply adding another line in the generic message about how to
find the page (eg. "You can find the original page by adding each
page's title after the http://wikieducator.org url" - hmm, I'm sure
this could be phrased better).

Thinking ahead, if this extension were to be implemented on all WMF
projects, and you could aggregate a collection from all WMF projects
into one file, the attribution would be significantly more complex, so
thought needs to be put into this hypothetical but very desirable
possibility. :-)

Looking forward to seeing how this develops.

Cheers,
Cormac