Extension:Collection/Wishlist/LQT Archive 1

Please add your ideas and feature requests to this page.

collection navigation

 * Table of contents as a page, for printing.
 * More fields for the title page (e.g. a picture, optional fields for author,institution for non wikipedias).

collection page

 * add link to "category:collections" (global and user) to this page
 * Implemented in revision 42329 Jbeigel 09:50, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Multiple nested articles. I'd like to be able to embed my articles in sections more than one level deep.
 * I second that.--Even Thorbergsen 14:24, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Add article sections. I'd like to add individual sections only to create book chapters that cut across a set of related articles.
 * I second that.--Even Thorbergsen 14:24, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Modifying an existing book
When you load an existing book, the book name should be included in the appropriate "Save and share your book" field. You then can simply click the "save book" button instead of figuring out the old book name ;)

Features

 * MySQLi support
 * Allow users to keep their collections private (This makes it not show up on the Category:Collections)
 * Create a "My collections" link which shows up when a user is logged in. This shows all the collections created by a single user.
 * Ticket http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/ticket/330 Jbeigel 09:27, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Include SVGs as vector format in PDF, for better print quality and lower file size.
 * This would require a lot of work in the writers. Also the image fetching would have to be changed. Furthermore I believe that in many cases the file size would actually increase: there are many articles where lots of flag icons are used - the resulting png images are approx. 20px wide and should be a lot smaller than the svg images. Volker.haas 13:19, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Some Checkboxes that influnce the Output:
 * GFDL: Yes/No
 * Images: Yes/Gray/No
 * external Links: link/In-text/bottom of page/end of chapter/end of book/no (at least yes and no)
 * Directly save resulting pdf at commons/wiki (that you don't have to generate it every time new!)
 * Rendered collections are cached until they are removed by some external cron job. The advantages are: (a) The PDF writer and other software is being constantly improved and all improvements will be incorporated in PDFs that are re-rendered from time to time. (b) The articles themselves change. If an article collection is saved as wiki page and re-rendered on a later date, the newest revisions of the contained articles are used. (There is a ticket that addresses the problem that older revisions should be used explicitly instead) Jbeigel 14:13, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Name the resulting file as the collection was named instead of collection.pdf/odf
 * This can be problematic, as almost any valid Unicode character is allowed in the (optional!) title of a collection and every OS/filesystem has some restrictions regarding filenames. I think it's not too hard to rename the resulting file. Jbeigel 14:16, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Translate the standard-texts into local languages (I would o for german):
 * "External links" -> "Externe Links"
 * "Source:" -> "Quelle"
 * "Principal Authors:" -> "Hauptautoren"
 * "PDF generated using the open source mwlib toolkit see http://code.pediapress.com/ for more information" -> "PDF-Export mit Hilfe des Open Source Toolkits mwlib, mehr Informationen unter http://code.pediapress.com/"
 * Texts like the above inside the PDF can now be localized. The localizations should soon be available at http://translatewiki.net/ Volker.haas 13:36, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
 * As of changeset cd35710572e7, l10ns for de, fr, hu, it and pl are avaiable. More will be included as soon as the integration with translatewiki.net is finished. Jbeigel 14:16, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Output HTML
I like the UI to add pages then output as a collection! But PDF as an output format is so 1990s. Can it generate a static set of HTML pages with a TOC? That would be more useful, lighter weight, and with latest CSS, equally attractive. -- skierpage 20:28, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
 * It seems like the Help:Print versions at Wikibooks. HTML would be a good option to add to the current list (PDF, Open Document). Helder 11:46, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Output of HTML would be a nice feature, as wiki text can be made available both as readonly web text and PDF/ODF-documents.--Even Thorbergsen 13:55, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Output LaTex
Is it possible to have the option to output the contents of a collection to a ".tex" file? If that could be done, someone (mathematician) could do some changes in the final tex file, or to use it into another document, and make a output (maybe a pdf) direct from the LaTex compiler... Helder 11:54, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Currently we do not plan to offer LaTex output. -- Volker.haas 10:16, 27 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Well I did my own project on creating Latex Output. It is explained here http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Benutzer:Dirk_Huenniger/wb2pdf. And example of the output is here http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Datei:Physikalische_Grundlagen_der_Nuklearmedizin.pdf


 * There is also an output plugin in Open Office that can write latex. You can copy and paste the page into oppen office and try that plugin.

Output EPub
Wikibooks on the beach ! It could be another open e-book format. But EPub is IMHO a fairly good and open standard. Contents are basically XHTML + CSS. An epub file then "only" needs packaging and metadata information in XML format to be generated. (EPUB, Mobileread wiki). - Daniel K. Schneider 07:52, 1 May 2009 (UTC)


 * These days the number of e-book readers is constantly increasing. As the book export feature of MediaWiki is meant to make reading the pages offline--mostly meaning on paper--possible, it is quite natural that more and more people want to use their reader for that. However, e-book readers do not display ODT and most of them also do not render PDF correctly.
 * Thus to add to the importance of an export function into EPUB. -- Bonwit 14:05, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
 * Just coming there because I'm trying to send a book to my ipod touch to get some content for offline access, think epub support would be fine ! Symac 13:01, 9 April 2010 (UTC)


 * I wrote something and I hope you'll find it useful: EPubExport. Nahsh 19:35, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
 * This should somehow be integrated in this extension. --he!ko 13:46, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I think the EPubExport extension is stable enough to be integrated with this extension. I don't really know how. Nahsh 10:20, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Output PDF
-- heuler06 18:09, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Images should have a white or transparent background. Transparent images' backgrounds appear black. ✅
 * The equations in the math environment are embedded as bitmap. Since the latex source is available they should be embedded as vector graphics using a math font. (wish of b:de:User:Dirk Huenniger)
 * unfortunately this is currently not possible because there is no feasible way to do this with the reportlab toolkit that is used to generate the PDFs Volker.haas 13:08, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I wish it would build a Table of Contents in the beginning with page numbers. Ideally these would link to pages in the document rather than to the internet.
 * I second this. I'd also like to have the PDF understand the TOC as well (so viewers that understand TOC sections can show them)
 * I with there were an option for links to pages that are in the pdf actually link to the pdf rather than back to the wiki online
 * The pdf that is generated looks good and with the usability improvement it makes it even better. Is it possible to take the title of each article, subtitles etc. and generate bookmarks?
 * The PDFs should already contain bookmarks. Chapters, Articles and all Sections should be listed in the bookmark section of the PDF viewer. Volker.haas 13:15, 28 November 2008 (UTC)
 * And a Table of Content (the Special:Book page should have the beginning/end/no option) FrViPofm 16:35, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
 * There is a ticket for that issue. -- Volker.haas 10:22, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Instead of external images being referred to as a footnote, an option to include the external images into the rendered PDF would be quite handy.
 * The main title is not very sexy ;-) (bad justification of first page, would be better centered) Is it a way to record some style in User:Me/Collections in a some stuff... FrViPofm 16:35, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
 * It is possible to center title and subtitle in the first page by modifying customconfig.py render configuration file. Unfortunately, seems to be impossible to introduce an image...
 * Wish to have links to the anchors inside the PDF --LeSurHumain 00:08, 6 February 2010 (UTC)
 * Wish to have an option to embed fonts into PDF Vlsergey 13:01, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Semantic Wiki integration
I was thinking about something to generate Collections dynamically with a SMW query. This would be the code in the Collection page: --Tischda 10:38, 15 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I think first the properties and so on should be displayed correctly in PDF and ODT Output, by know there are this ugly Property::Value things in the PDF or ODT
 * Second the Output of semantic queries should be displayable in PDF or ODT.
 * I think this is more important then generating Collections from Queries. --DaSch 17:10, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I use a workaround for properties: Create a template with  --Tischda
 * But thats not really a good solution. And adding a proper handling to collection should not be that difficult. --DaSch 21:33, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

As mentioned in the previous thread: Collection should render SMW inline queries like --Saruman! 13:49, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
 * -- (which should yield a number)
 * -- which should give an SMW-generated table
 * -- which will render a table from a template

Substituting templates in global namespace
On german Wikibooks, we use book own templates with the form “Bookname/ Template:Templatename”. I would like it substitute with a alternative template with name “Bookname/ Template:PrintTemplatename”. Please add substituting for templates in this form. --Prog 17:30, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
 * To be more precise, template substitutions should work with at least two Namespaces - NS-TEMPLATE and NS-MAIN. We use NS-MAIN for bookspecific-templates, which we include via  {{:  - mechanism. This is for different reasons. Either to create different versions of a book - Think of different types of a single book - one book with solutions and the other without them. We use our NS-TEMPLATE in a different way and with other project-specific policies  and would like to continue to do so. -- Thepacker 19:48, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

legal stuff
-- heuler06 18:09, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Due to the GFDL there has to be the text of the GFDL in the document. ✅
 * The author(s) of the images should be named as well as the license of the images, at least for CC- and GFDL-licenses.
 * All images now link to their origin in the wikipedia/commons. This is not quite the same as the above proposal, but I believe, that way licenses and image contributors can be checked quite easily. Volker.haas 13:12, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Start new page for every article

 * Is it possible to start a new page for every article in the collection? Now the articles are all appended into one 'big' article and then exported to PDF, what I would like to see is that every single article is exported to a new PDF page in the same document (like the chapter function).
 * This in controllable through options to mwlib.rl, but it would be nice to have it as an option in Collections.

Load saved Collection
Is it possible to open (load) a once saved collection?
 * Yes of course, just go to the page of the saved collection and click on the "Load collection" link in the sidebar Jbeigel 09:43, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

No portlet in the sidebar
I do not see a portlet in my sidebar, I think it is due to the fact that my urls are different. My urls look like this: http://www.mysite.com/index.php/Categorie:CatName. If I port my installation to another server it works, here the url links look like: index.php?title=ArticleName. How is this possible?
 * First of all: This is neither a support forum (preferably use the mailing list for questions), nor a bug tracker, but a feature wishlist. See http://code.pediapress.com/ for more information. Regarding your question: Displaying the portlet does not depend on the URL format, e.g. Wikibooks sites use the short URLs and the portlet is displayed just fine. Did you follow the steps described in the README.txt of the Collection extension? Jbeigel 14:29, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Installpackage

 * An separate Windows installer or maybe a xampp addon for Windows that includes the pdf rendering server (mwlib) would be nice and timesaving

More like the wikipage
On my wiki(http://www.wecowi.de) (I'm using Semantic MediaWiki) the pages I create with Collection are not nearly like the page. For example CSS-Styles like display:none are not used, and the semantic Links with property::page are taken into the generated PDF and so on. Another think is that the formating of tables is not right, they all go over the whole page. So please make the pages look a bit nicer. At the moment the usebility for my wiki tends against zero and thats very dissapointing. --DaSch 19:44, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Extension Tags
It should be possible tot exclude extension-tags which, for now, are not supported. Tags like:   or

Extension support
The images created by the BasicGnuplot and Graphviz extensions should be included in the pdf putput.

Userrights
Currently any registered user can create a book (community collection) in the project namespace (see Wikipedia:Wikipedia:books). Is it possible to limit this ability to autoconfirmed users? Ruslik0 20:34, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Page tweaking
Would it be possible to change pagination? I explain myself: My pdfs get rendered with two nearly blank pages at the end: one for the sources and contributors and another one for the link to the license. Can I fix it somehow to avoid printing unnecessary pages? Thanks, Paucabot 21:24, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Business Options
It would be appropriate as we do add your feature there by pushing traffic to you so it would only be fair to offer us 'other' wiki members with the same treatment your provide to wikipedia, a small portion of the proceeds. Thank you, --iWiki 02:56, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Start Page
My generated pdfs start with a page that only contains the title of the collection. I would appreciate it if I could enhance the content of the start page (e.g. with a picture or text). Maybe this is already possible, but I've found no clue on how to achieve this. --Sebastian.Dietrich 06:57, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

Two-pass transformation
The most serious deficiencies of the PDF-transformation are probably due to an apparent one-pass process. To accomodate link-enabled table of contents and PDF-internal links for wiki-internal links, a two-pass (or more) handling is necessary.--Even Thorbergsen 14:54, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
 * I "retract" this wish, as it seems to have been implemented after the 1.1 version, the one I have tried.--Even Thorbergsen 09:49, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Easier Upload to a Page
Problem: many people are confused by how to upload files in Mediawiki because it is geared towards having a flat attachments space so that attached files can easily be shared on multiple pages. But this leads to confusion because people have to manually copy/remember the attachment name (a multi-step/multi-page process) to paste into the page they really want to upload it to.

Proposed Solution:
 * 1) Create a new template for doing attachments from and make an Upload-to-page link. When this link is invoked, it will note from which page it is called (for use in step 2).
 * 2) Once the file is browsed and uploaded, the user is returned to the page they uploaded from (instead of to the attachment page) and in edit mode. There will be a small box at the top of the page which will contain the link information they need to copy paste into the page at the appropriate location. There can still be a link to the uploaded attachment page in case the user wants to go there.

''Not sure if this can be accomplished through the Extensions framework. --NewMexicoKid 17:53, 10 February 2010 (UTC)''

Image labeling
The current state is, that licensing and source information about pictures in the article/book are in one large list at the end of the exported document, it is ok. The problem is, that it is usually very dificult to find out which info is for which image and vice versa, there should be some kind of labeling similar to references. It should work with any thumbed image.

For pictures which are not thumbed I propose following: --Reaperman 15:47, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
 * if the picture is in a template (like infobox), there is not much to do, just count it as labeled in the list but not adding any label text to picture
 * if picture is outside any template and is in similar size to thumbed images, render it as thumbed
 * if the picture is of small size, especially when it doesn't have any title text, allow user to exclude these images from rendering into the book