Help:Collections/Feedback

Latest comment: 7 years ago by Sendoshin in topic A request for HTML output
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There is a central page at meta.wikimedia.org gathering all major issues with this extension. Issues that can't be solved and are not yet covered on the page at meta should be added there.

For obvious bugs the issue tracker is the preferred place to directly issue and check tickets.

At IRC #pediapress some immediate support might be available.

Proposal: require javascript edit

Please make it possible, that javascript is not needed to use this nice service. Thanks!

Added it to their bug tracker.  — Mike.lifeguard | talk 23:41, 28 October 2008 (UTC)Reply
Bug is fixed. Jbeigel (talk) 15:32, 10 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

Question: Quiz edit

Is there a way to use the quiz together with collections? For example: it would be nice if the software could show the answers that are in the quiz code in a section after the exercises... But until now, even the questions are not displayed correctly... Helder 00:00, 1 April 2009 (UTC)Reply

As far as I know the quiz extension is not supported by wikibooks. If it was, you should be able to use the standard tricks to have a different on-screen and print version, i.e. <includeonly> and <noinclude> if you use the traditional print version approach and substitution templates if you use collections. --Martin Kraus (talk) 13:31, 1 April 2009 (UTC)Reply
I didn't realize that it is not enabled here... I use it at pt.wikibooks. I'm thinking about using the includeonly/noinclude tags, thank you! but it seems the syntax will became a lot complex in order to properly render in the pdf version created by collections... Helder 14:15, 2 April 2009 (UTC)Reply

Question: image and code edit

Hi, I have made pdf from page : Fractals/Iterations_in_the_complex_plane/Julia_set Julia set. It looks good. The only problem is that the code is on the image . See for example section "External distance estimation" in pdf file. Here psedocode : "if (LastIteration==IterationMax) then { /* interior of Julia set: color = black */ }...." Is on the image : Julia set : image with C source code. How can I change it ? Regards. --Adam majewski (talk) 07:47, 30 May 2009 (UTC)Reply

Bug: Errors in creating ODF book edit

Trying to create http://lt.wikibooks.org/wiki/Linux_žaliems:_openSUSE gets this error:

An error occured on the render server: traceback Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/pp/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mwlib-0.12.13-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/mwlib/apps/render.py", line 177, in __call__ writer(env, output=tmpout, status_callback=self.status, **writer_options) File "/home/pp/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mwlib-0.12.13-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/mwlib/odfwriter.py", line 775, in writer w.writeBook(book, output=output) File "/home/pp/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mwlib-0.12.13-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/mwlib/odfwriter.py", line 146, in writeBook self.write(e, self.doc.text) File "/home/pp/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mwlib-0.12.13-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/mwlib/odfwriter.py", line 238, in write self.write(c,e) File "/home/pp/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mwlib-0.12.13-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/mwlib/odfwriter.py", line 238, in write self.write(c,e) File "/home/pp/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mwlib-0.12.13-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/mwlib/odfwriter.py", line 238, in write self.write(c,e) File "/home/pp/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mwlib-0.12.13-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/mwlib/odfwriter.py", line 234, in write if not saveAddChild(parent, e): File "/home/pp/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mwlib-0.12.13-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/mwlib/odfwriter.py", line 191, in saveAddChild p.addElement(c) File "/home/pp/local/lib/python2.6/site-packages/mwlib-0.12.13-py2.6-linux-x86_64.egg/mwlib/odfwriter.py", line 85, in addElement log("ParagraphProxy:addElement() ", e.type, "not allowed in any parents, failed, should have been added to", self.type) AttributeError: Element instance has no attribute 'type' sys.argv=['/home/pp/local/bin/mw-render', '--logfile', '/home/pp/cache/serve/1c/1cd5dd77142f3cd2/mw-render.log.odf', '--error-file', '/home/pp/cache/serve/1c/1cd5dd77142f3cd2/errors.odf', '--status-file', '/home/pp/cache/serve/1c/1cd5dd77142f3cd2/status.odf', '--writer', 'odf', '--output', '/home/pp/cache/serve/1c/1cd5dd77142f3cd2/output.odf', '--pid-file', '/home/pp/cache/serve/1c/1cd5dd77142f3cd2/pid.odf', '--metabook', '/home/pp/cache/serve/1c/1cd5dd77142f3cd2/metabook.json', '--keep-zip', '/home/pp/cache/serve/1c/1cd5dd77142f3cd2/collection.zip', '--config', 'http://lt.wikibooks.org/w', '--template-blacklist', 'MediaWiki:PDF Template Blacklist', '--template-exclusion-category', 'Exclude in print', '--print-template-prefix', 'Spausdinti', '--print-template-pattern', '$1/Print', '--script-extension', '.php', '--language', 'lt']

I found that this related to:

  • Some links has # symbol
  • There is some <!-- ... --> markup
  • Name of article has : symbol

But PDF generates sucessfully!

Can somebody fix this ODF book creation error?

Bug: repeats the first 5 entries in the table of contents edit

On the first page, the first five items are shown with page numbers twice Pearts (talk) 23:11, 31 July 2010 (UTC) as inReply

Contents
Articles
Editing Wikitext 1
Editing Wikitext/Emphasis and Links 3
Editing Wikitext/Indents and Lists 9
Editing Wikitext/Headers 13
Editing Wikitext/Preformatted Text 16
Editing Wikitext/Pictures/The Quick Course 27
Editing Wikitext/Pictures/Tiled Images 40

Articles
Editing Wikitext 1
Editing Wikitext/Emphasis and Links 3
Editing Wikitext/Indents and Lists 9
Editing Wikitext/Headers 13
Editing Wikitext/Preformatted Text 16
Editing Wikitext/Pictures/The Quick Course 27
Editing Wikitext/Pictures/Tiled Images 40
Editing Wikitext/Pictures/Images in Containers 43
Editing Wikitext/Tables 58
Editing Wikitext/Tables Ready to Use 70
Editing Wikitext/Making Templates A101 75

Where? – Adrignola talk 23:59, 31 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

Bug: pdf book font is kinda small edit

the book font look like it's a 8pt font, thats really small, it should be a 10 or 12 point font. Pearts (talk) 23:16, 31 July 2010 (UTC)Reply

Did you check to see if you are viewing the PDF at 100% zoom or not? It may be fitting the PDF to the window size. – Adrignola talk 00:00, 1 August 2010 (UTC)Reply

Images can be improperly positionned in generated PDF edit

Hi,

I've generated a PDF form the Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro wikibook. Resulting PDF is : here (A4 format).

Result is good, except for some pages where images (which appeared centered on the online version) are moved partially outside the right margin in the generated PDF. Example of such page incorreclty generated is Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Coordinate_Transformations (the 3rd image of the LEM is centered online, but incorrect in the generated PDF).

Please help. A.M.Reng. (discusscontribs) 11:11, 19 August 2011 (UTC)Reply

Cannot save collection,using Collections tool edit

I use IE9, and I have been a user here for over a month. I cannot fill in a collection file name for either my namespace or the wiki space -- the input field is disabled. And so is the "submit" button for the field.

If I modify the HTML on-the-fly from my browser to fill in the collection name and enable the submit button, then hit the submit button, the save never happens. Yesterday, when I tried this, I got a bunch of wiki errors.--AngelinaBelle (discusscontribs) 11:25, 19 October 2011 (UTC)Reply

I have filed a bug report for this, as I see it's also been reported at Wikipedia and I was able to reproduce the error when saving. I had to try to save to the Wikibooks namespace, as I was able to fill in the text field for the Wikibooks namespace, but not the user namespace. – Adrignola discuss 14:20, 19 October 2011 (UTC)Reply

A few issues with PDF render edit

I like collections, but the output just isn't up to it at the moment and it looks like I'll have to go back to print versions. You can find the issues here in a collection I've been trying to build:User:Pluke/Collections/Unit2

  • <syntaxhighlight> tag not working
  • passing <syntaxhighlight> to a template causes the template parameter to not be passed correctly, defaulting back to {{{1}}}
  • You can't have an exercise box that spreads over more than one page
    • See Boolean gate combination
  • internal wikipedia links are not highlighted, but present ie. using: [[w:apple|apple]]
  • inconsistent rendering of CSS / styles
    • box widths not 100% when they are in wiki view
    • background colours missing from most css
    • style formatting of text in tables doesn't seem to work
  • wikitable display is inconsistent
    • table caption is displayed incorrectly |+ '''Examples of Boolean Algebra shown in a truth table''' (this may be a result of nested tables not being handled correctly)
  • transparency on SVGs appears as plain black
  • <big> tag not working
  • {{cquote}} rendering is a little clumsy, the speech marks over lap the text

Pluke (discusscontribs) 22:12, 20 December 2011 (UTC)Reply

Section Numbers edit

I'm in the process of adding chapter and section numbers for a collection, specifically Wikibooks:Collections/GLSL_Programming_in_Unity. The idea is to hard code chapter and section numbers in that page and to have a template ({{GLSL Programming Unity SectionRef}}) with hard coded chapter and section numbers to produce numbered references in the output for print. Whenever the numbering changes (e.g. when sections are added, removed, or moved around), these two pages but no other pages have to be changed. Is there an easier way to achieve a similar result? --Martin Kraus (discusscontribs) 22:01, 19 May 2012 (UTC)Reply

Positive Feedback edit

I am not sure whether this is the proper venue for submitting such feedback, but it's the only one I've found so far. I am very impressed with the quality of the output of the PDF generation. I mean, I'm no document expert or anything, but it exceeds anything I expected. Quite excellent. If anyone could pass on my congratulations and my thanks to the people who made the PDF generation system possible, I would be grateful. A job well done. -- 00:39 28 January 2013 (UTC)

A request for HTML output edit

Some time ago I downloaded the wikibook Blender 3D: Noob to Pro. Originally it was in three large HTML files, "Beginner Tutorials", "Advanced Tutorials", and "Miscellaneous Tutorials". This was very convenient and made it very easy to use offline while teaching myself how to use Blender. Unfortunately, in the intervening period some misguided person has spent a lot of effort cutting up the three large pages into what are now 254 small pages, some consisting of only a single paragraph. I'm sure this person meant well and undoubtedly had in mind the oft-repeated saying that webpages should consist of little more than a screenful of data. (I have tried to find the origin of this suggestion that smaller pages are somehow "better". It always seemed to me a rather patronising belief, as if we "ordinary folk" are not capable of maintaing our attention for more than a few minutes at a time. It seems very out of place on the Wikibooks site, where people have deliberately come to look for long-form content.) Sadly, this decimation has made what was a wonderful resource into something completely unusable for offline reading.

So I tried today to collect all 254 pages into a downloadable book, with disastrous results.

It took about 4 hours going through all the pages to click on the "Add this page to your collection" link at the head of each page. (The hover "Add this page to your collection" links on the main index page don't display.) I finally had the collection ready to be rendered and downloaded. Away it went rendering for what may have been half an hour, then presented me with the link to download the epub. (I intended to unzip the epub later and pull out the HTML files that comprise it.) I clicked the link and I'm not sure how long it took then displaying a blank page (20 minutes?) before finally saying that an error had occurred. I went back to the earlier page and tried downloading again. Another error and a note saying that my collection seems to have been deleted (though I don't think it was). I tried a few more times, including attempting to download as OpenDocument format (I could convert that to HTML later).

Interestingly I looked around in the /tmp directory on my machine and found three 13MB files that are incomplete PDF documents with times corresponding to my attempts to download the epub and OpenDocument files... but I never requested PDF. (I've since tried a test on a single page, and the collection process only delivers PDF.)

May I request adding HTML format to the book collection formats? It would be much easier to do than the other three formats. PDF is terribly bloated and suited only to printing on paper. OpenDocument format is similar, but at least possible to convert to other formats. The epub format is a conveniently compact reader format, but none of the three formats allow animated gifs or sounds and videos to play. HTML alone is capable of printing, displaying animated gifs and playing sound and video.

Can I also request that the policy of slicing pages into ever smaller and smaller pieces be reversed? It is a terribly retrograde step that makes books virtually unusable unless you are lucky enough to have cheap, fast, always-on internet. Most of the planet still has expensive, slow, occasional internet. Remember, this isn't Wikipages or Wikiparagraphs, it is Wikibooks. People come here looking for large chunks of information: books. To serve it up to them in tiny chunks is to sorely underestimate them, and as it did for me today, makes life far more difficult than it need be. It has sadly made Blender 3D: Noob to Pro completely unusable for offline work. It's like tearing the pages out of a paper book and handing them to a reader one at a time as they request them, instead of letting the reader have the whole book to read as they wish. It makes no sense.

Miriam e (discusscontribs) 08:47, 9 December 2013 (UTC)Reply

Splitting the tutorials into smaller pages was done to make it easier to find specific tutorials. Having them all on one page is great for reading through the entire contents, in order, or for reference offline, but it isn't so useful for being able to find the specific thing you're looking up. Also, splitting these into separate pages makes it considerably easier to see which tutorials need to be fleshed out (those with just a single paragraph, for example), which is one of the areas in which this particular book needs lots of improvement.
I agree that HTML export would be useful, though there is one important caveat that isn't noted here. Images don't come with HTML files - with animated GIFs being one of your listed concerns, that's a big deal, here. So it'd have to be an HTML archive of some sort. Still. It'd be useful.
That said, PDF actually does support animated GIFs, audio files, and video. These files can easily be embedded into the PDF. I'm not sure whether the PDF renderer is smart enough to actually do that, but it does seem like a good idea to add if not.
Sendoshin (discusscontribs) 22:18, 5 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

HTML Printable Version edit

If Collections could be output as HTML, than the Collections feature could supersede the current {{printable}} feature, and all forms could easily stay in sync with one another. Pat Hawks (discusscontribs) 03:29, 25 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

BUG - PDF generation failed repeatedly for the collection at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Data_Structures edit