Re: WYSIWYG content development (was Re: Rethinking Brands)

Sanford Forte wrote:
> Currently, one fo the weaknesses of Wikibooks in regard to K-12  
> textbook production is lack of a seamless way to get all WYSIWYG to  
> print, and garnering a focus on one project, to prove it can be done.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
> Sanford
>   

I would have to agree that this is a weakness of Wikibooks, even though 
some efforts along those lines have been done using PDF files to try and 
make up for some of the short comings of the wiki markup syntax.  Part 
of the problem here is that HTML was never intended to be a WYSIWYG 
markup language, and the Wiki environment suffers from the same 
shortcomings in this regard.

The strength of Wikibooks, however, is the collaborative nature of the 
wiki interface.  In spite of those who suggest Wikibooks authors tend to 
go off onto their own "pet" project and not have any interaction, I have 
seen a huge degree of collaboration or at least commentary on several 
"books" that I've worked on within Wikibooks.  I will admit that often 
months or years go by between comments sometimes, but several of the 
pages I've worked on have had some significant fixes, if even only to 
correct spelling on a couple of words.   The prevailing attitude at the 
moment on Wikibooks is to get the content put together, and then we will 
worry about formatting and appearance at a later date.

Some of the Wikijunior books have gone beyond this point to be something 
where actual formatting has become an issue, but this seems to be a 
rarity on Wikibooks at the moment... even for "featured books".

 From a technical standpoint, I am curious about how we could put into 
the Wiki markup syntax some features that could be applied to a more 
standardized formatting system, either borrowing heavily from or even 
completely adopting LaTeX or some other similar WYSIWYG description 
language.  This to me is the #1 issue that applies to any proposals that 
attempt to do a Wikisyntax to PDF direct conversion, as the current HTML 
to PDF approach will IMHO simply look plain ugly.  I would not want to 
even read much less purchase a book that uses the current Wikisyntax 
converted to HTML, and then have that printed out on paper.  Firefox 
does a valiant job when you try to print a web page onto paper, but it 
still looks like a very approximate representation and not the medium 
that the content was originally written to be read.

I have noticed that the FHSST group has tried to move toward something 
like LaTeX.  Compare these two pages:

http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=FHSST_Physics_Units:Unit_Systems&action=edit

http://www.fhsst.org/?q=node/6872

This is two very different ways to mark up what is supposedly the very 
same content.  I don't see as much coordination between the two versions 
of this textbook as I would have hoped for, but this does show some 
alternate ways to do this sort of markup on a text that is currently in 
use in a formal educational setting, and is Wikibooks related.

There are enough technically minded individuals on Wikibooks that may 
want to realistically come up with something that perhaps could overcome 
these barriers.  Since we are talking about books here and not 
encyclopedia articles, what kinds of changes ought to be made to help 
with the development of actual books that would be along these lines?