Re: The PDF generator on the toolserver has implications for quality control on a per-chapter basis

Andrew Whitworth wrote:
> I have Adobe Acrobat Pro, so when I've done PDFs in the past I use
> that and the results are typically very good and very accurate. i know
> that most other people don't have access to it (I only have a license
> through school). The PDF generator on the toolserver is a great idea,
> and though there are some problems, I thnk it's a great start. A few
> points/retorts:
>
>   
>> Do we need stable versions. I don't really see the need. Perhaps
>> someone could give examples of stable books that have deteriorated due
>> to the ease of editing.
>>     
>
> It has nothing to do with deterioration over time, it has more to do
> with the stable dependability that teachers and students will depend
> on over a semester. A teacher needs to be able to say "The homework is
> on page 95", and have all the faith in the world that page 95 today is
> the same as page 95 tomorrow. With that said, "stable versions" is
> basically a misnomer, because they aren't stable in a general sense,
> only with respect to a particular audience. That is, we could get a
> request that says "i'm teaching X class, and i want Y book to be
> stable for the duration of the semester." We could then create a
> stabilized version of that book for use in the class, while continuing
> to develop the book on the wiki in the background.
>
>   
>   
<*snip*>
> I like the method we have now, where books have printable versions (on
> wiki) and PDF versions. If we also had stable versions (especially if
> we had a tool for automagically creating such versions without
> requiring lots of copying, page protecting, etc), that would just be a
> bonus. In short: we should have many methods.
>
> --Andrew whitworth
>
>   

This is a general comment about "automated" PDF files that are created 
with something like the toolserver. While I am not necessarily against 
somebody spending the effort trying to make an automated process 
directly from the MediaWiki database of Wikibooks, I would have to 
consider any such effort created in this manner to be nothing more than 
a rough draft, and a considerable amount of additional effort would have 
to be done in order to create something that is book-like.

More explicit and to the point, anything that is automated from a bunch 
of web pages is simply going to be ugly.  Now I admit this is 
subjective, but web pages simply aren't books, as hard as you try.  
Wikibooks via a simple web interface is an important first step, and it 
does get us to gather the raw content which can be transformed into a 
book, but it is only about half-way to the goal of publishing a textbook 
even when you have some beautiful web pages and the written content is 
letter-perfect.

So far, there isn't anything on Wikibooks resembling what professional 
editors do in commercial publishing circles.  About the best example 
I've seen anywhere on a large-scale volunteer project is what the 
Distributed Proofreaders do with the Gutenberg Project draft texts, 
where there is a completely separate team of volunteers who review the 
formatting of the document after the actual grammar of the text has been 
been considered in the final form.

I'd also challenge that a book, a really good book, is in many ways a 
work of art unto itself.  Particularly a good textbook.  If we want to 
make textbooks that really revolutionize the publishing industry, and 
have them used in actual classrooms, we need to treat them as art forms 
and not something which massive shortcuts have been taken.

Is it possible to also include the unique book-only markup tags within 
the Wiki as well?  Yes, and I'll admit that.  But it isn't going to be 
easy to get going either.  I expect that a development team working very 
closely with Wikibooks participants to generate a very good combination 
of markup tags for book publishing that would generate quality PDF files 
will take years if not a full decade to perfect.  On this I am staking 
my experience and knowledge of software development cycles I've gained 
over several decades of writing computer software, and years of being 
involved with Wikibooks.

By far and away the current best "free" method of generating a PDF file 
is to import the text into Open Office, formatting the content to be 
much more book-like, and exporting the PDF file.  Acrobat Pro certainly 
does better (Adobe wrote the spec, so they understand it better), but as 
you said, not everybody on Wikibooks can afford that software.

-- Robert Horning