Help:Books/Frequently Asked Questions
Questions about PDF exports
Why are articles displayed differently than in the browser?
Books have no scroll bars, while a browser does, so printed content needs to be split up on several pages. To get an acceptable typesetting result, some page elements need to be displayed differently. This may result in some unexpected layouts, especially for tables and parts of wiki articles that use HTML instead of MediaWiki markup.
How can I improve the appearance?
You can edit the wiki articles themselves to make them print better. See Help for Experts for some ideas.
Questions about OpenDocument Text exports
What is OpenDocument Text?
The OpenDocument format (ODF) is an XML based file format originally created and implemented by the OpenOffice.org office suite. It is a free and open OASIS standard aimed to replace the proprietary Microsoft Word file format.
Storing books in this format is useful if one wants to modify the books. This options allows to generate arbitrarily styled books with additional content. Teachers may find this useful.
Which software is required to open this file?
OpenOffice.org, Koffice or others. There also is an ODF-AddIn for Microsoft Word.
General questions regarding the book tool
Where can I find stored books ?
All stored books are placed in Category:Books.
How do the exports comply with license requirements?
PDF export
- link to each article and its version
- all contributors are mentioned
- images are linked to their image page on the wiki
- Warning: Authors and licenses of images are not part of the PDF. So these PDFs can not be distributed without further manipulation if they contain images.
- inclusion of the GFDL (English)
In printed books
- URL of each article and its version
- all contributors are mentioned
- URL of each image
- all contributors of an image are mentioned
- license name of the image is mentioned
- inclusion of the GFDL (English)
Which known limitations exist?
Book size
Currently books can not contain more than 500 articles. Please keep in mind that generation of large PDFs can take a long time and results in high server load. Dividing article collections into multiple books might be a solution.
Printed books currently support no more than 800 pages (not articles!).
- Rule of thumb: Printed books (A5) have approximately 2 times the number of pages than the PDFs (A4) have.
Infoboxes and large tables
Infoboxes and other large tables are printed at full page size, not "floated" to the side as on the Web. This is a result of the limited size of A5 paper: if the infobox was shrunk to fit, the text within would be illegible.
CSS & HTML
CSS and HTML used in the wiki markup are only partially evaluated when generating PDFs. Templates can be adjusted for print to avoid some of the problems, see Help for Experts for details.
TeX formulas
Due to technical limitations Math-tags are rendered as raster images and not in print-quality.
Where to report bugs and give general feedback?
Bugs, feature requests and questions are best reported via Flyspray