Book tool/Feedback

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Question: Principal Authors

How is the list of principal authors computed? It looks as if any contributor is listed.

Currently there is no consensus on "who are the principal authors" in the community. Therefore all contributors are mentioned. --he!ko 19:19, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Proposal: Add a table of contents

There is a ticket for this issue.

Did you consider to add a table of contents at the first page of the PDF? I think this might improve usability of larger PDFs. --he!ko 15:57, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Question: Differences between printed books and downloadable PDFs

I created a book and downloaded the PDF. When I wanted to order a printed book with pediapress and looked at the preview I noticed various differences!?

The layout of printed books differs, as a technology more suitable for printed books is used to generate the PDFs. Printed books feature a Table of Contents, an Index, have a different size (A5 or 8.5×5.5in) and images and tables are layouted differently. The downloadable PDF looks ok when printed (A4) at home and can be generated within a reasonable amount of time. The PDF of printed books is optimized for print and its generation takes way too long to be a viable alternative for Wikipedia. --he!ko 19:56, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Bug: <poem/>-tag not supported

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

It looks like the <poem/>-tag is not supported (example). He!ko 16:08, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Bug: License in the PDF looks strange

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

Any PDF created from an article on the French Wikipedia has two weird bits :

• Just before the license, a grey frame saying "Raccourcis [1]ées/Licence&hidetrans=1&hidelinks=1&hideimages=1 +"
• Juste after, the text "[1] http:/ / fr. wikipedia. org/ w/ index. php?title=Special:Pages_li" under the heading "Liens externes".

See for example the page http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Korrigan/bug1, whose PDF is here. (reported by fr:Utilisateur:Korrigan, moved here).--he!ko 19:09, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I should maybe add that the name of the license (GFDL) does not appear on the French Wikipedia, and maybe it is linked to this problem? le Korrigan →bla 08:26, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

The logfiles hint to [1] as being the license used, at least for de:. Need to investigate further. --he!ko 09:49, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Wiki sites can now set their custom license source which should solve this issue. See Book_tool#Setting_a_custom_license_source for details. --he!ko 15:36, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Bug: PNG logo has a black background

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

On the article fr:Star Wing (PDF), on page 10, the logo is a PNG with a transparent background but is rendered with a black background. I haven't seen other images doing this. le Korrigan →bla 08:15, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately this is a bug in the PDF toolkit we are using. There is a ticket about that in our bug tracker, and the bug has been submitted to the PDF toolkit developers. -- Volker.haas 13:48, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Bug: Weird indent with bullet points

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

On the article fr:Star Wing (PDF), page 15, the section "Médias externes" is rendered with a weird indent, possibly caused by the templates. Note that if you know which template or which aspect causes this and it is a fr.wikipedia-specific issue I can maybe address it but so far I don't know. Thanks! le Korrigan →bla 08:19, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

I added a ticket for that problem. -- Volker.haas 14:03, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Bug: Infoboxes take up all width

There is a ticket for this issue.

On most French Wikipedia articles with an infobox (such as fr:Star Wing PDF, page 1), the infobox takes up all the width. And the title of the infobox is on the left and not centered. I do not know whether this is something to be solved by you or on fr.wikipedia, any advice would be welcomed :-) le Korrigan →bla 08:22, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

This is a known issue and there is not much that can be done about that. Please see the FAQ for some limitations of this tool. --he!ko 14:52, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

We are thinking about a solution, but it won't be here tomorrow.--he!ko 09:18, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Proposal: localise "Contributors" and "anonymous edits"

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

}

I can't seem to be able to localise the texts "Contributors" and "anonymous edits" on fr.wikipedia. We should be able to do so. Thanks. le Korrigan →bla 08:25, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

These can be localized on betawiki --he!ko 14:54, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! le Korrigan →bla 19:32, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Bug: Two supplementary external links

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

On fr:Star Wing (PDF), page 19, a new section "Liens externes" is added, with two external links pointing to the English Wikipedia. I think they are caused by the banner "Featured Article" at the end of the article, which has two external links itself (however not the same ones). le Korrigan →bla 08:28, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Proposal: License and authors of images

There is a ticket for this issue.

As far as I see there is a link to the commons page for an image, which might be fine as long as the pdf is still in the computer. But the license and authors for images should be shown after printing it too. Can it be a list after the contributors? /Ainali 17:23, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

PDF Download doesn't run

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

Hello.

In this book, when I want to click on "Télécharger en PDF", it doesn't run. --ComputerHotline 12:10, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

I notified the tech team but got no response yet. You may try to bother them also on IRC #wikimedia-tech. --he!ko 16:55, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

"no space [was] left on device". Should be working again. --he!ko 13:38, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Bug: "ref name=" causes problems with some templates

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

When a template accepts an unnamed parameter (in the form {{template|parameter}} instead of {{template|parameter=value}}, and if the parameter value contains a sign equal ("="), usually the template doesn't work and returns {{{1}}}, this is standard MediaWiki behaviour. However this doesn't happen when using <ref name="something"> : it works fine on MediaWiki, but causes problems with PDF export. See fr:Utilisateur:Korrigan/bug2 and corresponding PDF export.

Thanks, le Korrigan →bla 19:58, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

(should be fixed with this changeset)

Thanks, le Korrigan →bla 19:04, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Bug: formatnum: doesn't work

{{formatnum:}} doesn't seem to work, or at least doesn't take into account localised settings. See fr:Utilisateur:Korrigan/bug3 for expected and actual PDF output. This means that French-specific output isn't obtained, and it can cause confusion as we use the comma for decimals instead of the dot.

Thanks, le Korrigan →bla 20:07, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Is somebody looking to resolve this problem ? — Riba ^(talk) 19:58, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Bug:Unwanted link with fr:Template:Date

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

For some reason, a link is created in the PDF to the page fr:octobre 1970. It has been noticed on fr.wikipedia using the template {{date}}, but I have made some tests on fr:Utilisateur:Korrigan/bug4 and I can't find the cause for it. Sorry. le Korrigan →bla 20:23, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

This is somewhat confusing. Can you give a minimal example where this links appears in the PDF although it should not appear? --he!ko 18:48, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

This completely puzzles me. If I put just the wikilink in a page, there is no link created in PDF (see fr:Utilisateur:Korrigan/bug7). If I expand the "date" template then no link is created either (see fr:Utilisateur:Korrigan/bug6). But if I put the "date" template, then it does create a link in PDF, whether it is before or after other wikilinks (see fr:Utilisateur:Korrigan/bug5). The code {{date||octobre|1970}} is responsible for that. And actually it happens with any page (see fr:Utilisateur:Korrigan/bug8), so it is clearly this syntax which causes the problem. I'm afraid the "date" template is a complex one with a lot of parser functions... so I can't really debug that. le Korrigan →bla 19:03, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing that, but can you explain what caused it? Out of curiosity. le Korrigan →bla 16:04, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

No, I asked my colleague but he had no clue what update fixed it. Sorry. --he!ko 09:44, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Extension Tags and other not printable code

We are using some extensions which are not supported. So tags like: <googlemaps></googlemaps><DynamicArticleList></DynamicArticleList> are not parsed correctly. It would be nice to have an option in Collections to exclude these tags and also other wiki-texts which are not printable. 15:21, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Which site are you talking about? If you run your own PDF-server you can easily implement this in tagext.py. --he!ko 18:44, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Proposal: have a better link at the end

Currently, when producing a PDF, there is a link at the end leading to the printed version (eg http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?oldid=XXXXXXX).

• The first problem is that this link is not clikable currently, it probably should be.

This should be fixed with the next update. -- Volker.haas 14:17, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

• The second problem is that this link is a bit "obscure" to the average Wikipedia reader, maybe a second link should be added, pointing to "the current version of this article", leading to the usual http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article, so that the origin of the article is more clear.
• Maybe the PDF generation date can be printed as well? Or maybe the date / time of last article revision? I know this may be already in the PDF metadata, but 1) it is not easily accessible to beginners, and 2) there may be different "last revision dates" when several articles are put together, so saying how old is each one can be useful?

Thanks, le Korrigan →bla 19:07, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

We had a more readable link in earlier versions, but these did use two lines of text and looked really ugly. I prefer to stick with the current solution. There is a ticket for the creation date (and once this is implemented people will complain, that its formatting is not localized ;-) --he!ko 09:42, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Question: Templates "Hide from print" and "Only in print" ??

Here I read about templates "Hide from print" and "Only in print", but I can't seem to find out what the contents of these should be. Is there a description or example available somewhere ? - Erik Baas 21:33, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Hi Erik, I did not set this template up on en.wp since we changed something in the software. Somehow MW is not yet updated to the the new SW. I'll care about this issue once the new version is active. "Only in print" is explained here (last paragraph). --he!ko 16:42, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

OK, thanks, I'll wait for it. Meanwhile, I created a (temporary ?) solution with en:Template:Only_in_print plus en:Template:Only_in_print/style (and it works). - Erik Baas 02:40, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Bug: table headers in wrong column

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

The PDF for the enwiki Mount Hood has all the issues (mentioned above) related to tables and templates. In addition, the table on page 4 has five columns which mostly render okay, but the heading has those for columns 2, 3, 4, and 5 all in column 2's header. It has the !! present too (see below), so maybe the parser isn't the usual one, and doesn't understand some of the more recent extensions to wikitable markup? Or maybe the embedded citations are confusing it?

Area[22]
millions of ft² !!
Volume[22]
billions of ft³ !!
notes !! GNIS
location[23]

EncMstr 22:20, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Bug: { {main} } which displays Main article: <article name> disappears

On Mount Hood on page 6 it successfully contains the Climbing accidents section, but omits any reference to the main article, which appears due to the wikimarkup : {{main|Mount Hood climbing accidents}}. I can understand why a printed version might omit article links, but then shouldn't it remove the whole See also section? EncMstr 22:24, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

The Main Template was added to the Exclude in Print Category which prevents the templates content to appear in the PDF. This is intentional. If you think the Main Template should be printed this should probably be discussed. -- Volker.haas 13:24, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Thai alphabets showed as boxes in PDF

There is a ticket for this issue.

It seems that Thai alphabet rendered incorrectly. It shows Thai alphabets as boxes when rendering in PDF format; Thai language rendered in ODT format works fine. I tested rendering in other Asian characters such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean. They are rendered fine except Thai. --Manop 21:39, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Appearance: Article titles

The article title appear at the top of all pages. This looks bad on the first page because there's a small title at the top and a much bigger title underneath. One of them needs to be removed from the first page.--Patton123 13:07, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

It think this is pretty common in printed works and would not change it unless we get more complaints. --he!ko 09:38, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Screen copy of PDF

I would really like this titles (or at least the big one) to disappear too; especially on Dutch wikibooks, where titles are quite long, and also contain the book's title. Example: b:nl:Programmeren in TI-83+ Assembly/Speciaal/Problemen/TASM-foutmeldingen. It looks real ugly (see image), and is not necessary at all. - Erik Baas 12:47, 15 April 2009 (UTC) - Please ?

P.S.: This wikibook consists of 28 articles, so the printed book will contain 28 of these big fat bold titles, using up to 14% of the available space on each page... :-( - Erik Baas 00:37, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Bug: Image alternate text

Alternate text for images, which is visible when someoen has images turned off or uses a screenreader, appears instead of the image caption in all articles that use alternate text, including the "alt=" bit. (Example article)--Patton123 13:11, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Appearance: Wikitables

Wikitables, which are almost always necessary because htey contain information that isn't in prose, don't appear very well in many articles. (Example table)--Patton123 13:12, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Do you refer to the infobox or to the tank comparison table? Automatically translating tables to the fixed size constraints of paper formats is hard and I think both tables in this article are rendered reasonable. Nonetheless we are planning to improve the layout of frequently used infoboxes. --he!ko 09:57, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Bug: Icons

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

Small 17x17px icons such as File:North.svg show up HUGE, taking up whole pages and throwing the text out of line.--Patton123 13:16, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Can you please give an example article? I just checked w:List of sovereign states which features 250+ small SVG images and did not see any problems with them. --he!ko 15:28, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I could track the problem to the (protected) w:Template:Geographic Location. Setting the width attribute for the images would fix the problem. But since this is a navigational template it should rather be added to w:Category:Exclude in print. --he!ko 15:32, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Bug: External links

There is a ticket for this issue.

External links show up as typed out URLs instead of the link name or nothing at all. (Example article)--Patton123 13:17, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Proposal: Date and/or version of contents

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

I think the exported PDF, as well as the printed book, should contain the date of printing and/or a version number; in small print, in the footer of the first page. - Erik Baas 21:30, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

The version number (oldid) is already included, and the date has been suggested above in #Proposal: have a better link at the end. le Korrigan →bla 21:53, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

I missed the part about the date, sorry.

The inclusion of version numbers (oldid) is not good enough. A "book" may consist of a large number of wiki-articles, and this "oldid" will be at the end of each chapter; a version number (of the book, I mean) is only useful when it's on the first page. - Erik Baas 22:20, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Printed books do contain the creation date. For PDFs there is a ticket requesting this feature. --he!ko 08:07, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Bug:Chinese

There is a ticket for this issue.

see [2], chinese "，" can't display.--Shizhao 12:16, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Proposal: contributor opt-out

Is it possible for a contributor to opt-out of appearing in the list of contributors? For example I have edited some articles, and so my username will appear in the list in any PDF book that includes those articles. I am not really concerned either way, but it would be nice if I could place a special template on my user page that said, in effect, "opt-out of contributors list in books". Or something like "treat me as anonymous for books". 84user 13:50, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Page and chapter title formatting

There is a ticket for this issue.

I created a book on Italian Wikibooks: JavaScript, but the wiki markup in the piped links and in the chapter titles is not considered, and it is showed raw. It would be nice to have the possibility of formatting page and chapter titles. --Ramac 17:09, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

Revision date needed on article PDF

The PDF version of an article should have the date of the last edit included in the version rendered. This date is not (necessarily) the date the PDF was generated, which is the request of Ticket #443 mentioned above. That date would be a rather poor substitute, but it would be much better than the current situation which shows no date at all. -R. S. Shaw 07:24, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Bug: depends on Monobook

There is a ticket for this issue.

This can probably be considered a bug with either the Book tool *or* MediaWiki itself, but I'd like to point out that extension does not actually work with skins other than Monobook - the relevant sidebar links simply don't show up. In particular, this happens with the classic skin.

Since MediaWiki ships these skins by default and allows users to select them, I think it's fair to consider them to actually work. Whether the extension needs to be rewritten in a skin-agnostic manner or whether MediaWiki's facilities for allowing extensions to interact with the UI are too Monobook-centric and need to be improved is something I can't say, but I'm sure the developers will be able to work something out. :) -- Schnee 19:15, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

The problem is with some skin lacking behind MW compatibility. --he!ko 12:37, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Problems with proofread wikisource books

As you know, "proofread books" are books obtained with a proofread extension; in en.s this means to work on a special namespace Page:, where the text is introduced side to side to the image of scanned page of a book; then a textual verson is built up by transclusion of Page: pages.

I tested Book tool on such textual version in it.s (whereBook tool has been implemented from some days), then into en:s, where I built a test text s:User:Alex_brollo/Books/Equitation from some chapters of s:Equitation.

I found a big trouble, since most transclusions from Page: pages don't run politely. I found the same trouble into it.s. A minor trouble into en:s is printing of a [ page ] link into the text, but I know that this is rather easily managed using Template:Hide in print into the code of en:Template:Page, as we did into it.s.

Is there some trick so have a good PDF rendering of proofread wikisource books? Perhaps de:s friends found it, but I can't speak German. :-( --Alex brollo 18:59, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

I met heiko into #booktool irc channel. While building a "bug example" for him, I saw something interesting. I opened a 3d into Scriptorium of en.s, and I quote here part of my post.

In the meantime, I met heiko into #booktool irc channel. While creating a "simple book" to document the proofread bug for him (here: s:User:Alex brollo/Books/Equitation_test, from s:Equitation/Chapter 1), suddendly I saw one "bug rule", then a second one:

1. book tool renders only the last paragraph of a transcluded Page:
2. book tool doesn't know the page= parameter of image tags--Alex brollo 09:57, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Licenses

There is a ticket for this issue.

Wikisource needs a way have different licenses available for different pages. Not everything on Wikisource is GFDL. Most is Public Domain, but there are also materials under Creative commons and Free Art licenses--BirgitteSB 21:15, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

This is a known problem. See how to set a custom licence for your wiki for a possible workaround (by mentioning that some text may be covered by other licenses than the GFDL). Please consider to support this request Thanks, he!ko 19:58, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Bug: image gallery doesn't work correctly

There is a ticket for this issue.

Creating a book from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Campaign, the two image galleries do not size the images uniformly and the image captions are not present. Hlj 23:24, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Bug: external links cause bulleted list indentation error

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

When a bulleted list item contains an embedded external link, the following bullets are indented incorrectly. See the example in the References section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_from_Gettysburg where the reference to Esposito causes the following links to be indented. Hlj 23:04, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

This bug will be fixed in the refined version of the parser. -- Volker.haas 11:26, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Bug: Arabic Text Does Not Process Properly: All Letters Disconnected

There is a ticket for this issue.

Creating a PDF file from the Wiki Masdar version of The Thousand and One Nights causes a problem: http://ar.wikisource.org/wiki/%D8%A3%D9%84%D9%81_%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84%D8%A9_%D9%88%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84%D8 %A9/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D8%B2%D8%A1_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D9%88%D9%84 ... Here's a link for the creation page: http://ar.wikisource.org/wiki/%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%B5:%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%A8/rendering/?return_to=%D8%A3%D9%84%D9%81+%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84%D8%A9+%D9%88%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84%D8%A9%2F%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D8%B2%D8%A1+%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AB%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A&collection_id=549cf32fd17f6e99&writer=rl The text is running left-to-right and the letters are disconnected. All other formatting appears to be OK. Example here: http://ar.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%B5:%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%A8/download/&collection_id=549cf32fd17f6e99&writer=rl&return_to=%D8%A3%D9%84%D9%81+%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84%D8%A9+%D9%88%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%84%D8%A9%2F%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D8%B2%D8%A1+%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AB%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A

Unfortunately this is a known issue and we don't know how to handle it. The problem seems to be that the toolkit we are using to generate the PDFs doesn't automatically join arabic letters. If I am correct, character joining might be done by analysing the source-text and transforming single characters to different unicode points depending on their position in a word. If anybody knows tools that can achieve this, I would be very greatful. -- Volker.haas 15:56, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Bug: Intro missing in an article

In the article fr:Pôle Nord, the introduction (section 0, before the first header) is missing from the PDF version. I have no idea what causes it. le Korrigan →bla 17:49, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

After some trials, the bug may come from the introductory image (and not from templates), as it includes <br /> in its caption. le Korrigan →bla 18:44, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

I've pushed a little further and actually, the bug is from fr:Template:Coord... Is Wikipedia-EN is experiencing the same with en:Template:Coord ? Antaya 19:45, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately the link to the pdf is not working anymore ("old" pdfs are deleted after a while). And I don't see anything wrong with the article. Antaya, it looks if you spend quite some time adapting the markup - I assume you got rid of the problematic code. Could you post a markup snippet that is responsible the problem that was originally mentioned please. -- Volker.haas 15:10, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Bug: Template Coord

Hello devs!

WP-EN don't have this problem with English {{Coord}} compare to the French {{Coord}} :

• (French) fr:Ny-Ålesund — French book
• (English) en:Ny-Ålesund — English book

Thanks to take a look there. Antaya 12:18, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Check out en:Template:Coord#Coordinates_in_PDF. -- en:User:Docu/User:D2

Bug: License does not start on a new page

This issue should be resolved after the next software update.

The "License" header used to start at the top of a new page; was that changed on purpose, or is it a bug ? - Erik Baas 19:53, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Paper Sizes

Is there a way to render PDFs in paper formats other than A4? The printouts don't look very good in the US where it's impossible to buy ISO-sized paper... Stuuf 21:46, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Appearance: Math as raster images

Math sections (other than trivial ones that normally render as simple HTML) currently don't look as nice as the other text, since they're imported as raster images. Using vectors and text would look better. Part of the description of PediaPress says it uses TeX... Would it be possible to include the TeX math code directly if this is the case? Stuuf 21:51, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect paths

The links provided in the PDF output link to e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/windex.php?title= instead of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/windex.php?title=. --Eleassar ^{my talk} 20:06, 17 June 2009 (UTC)