Help:Books/Feedback/Archives/2016/August

This is an archive of past discussions about Help:Books. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current main page.

"The Book Creator software has been crippled since it was rebuilt in 2014"; "the situation is not going to change"

Frankly I'm wondering how these two statements can be justified together. If the system is broken, it should either be abandoned or fixed. My particular concern is consistemt failure to render equations in the right hand column in such a way that they don't fall off the right hand side of the page in PDF and get truncated. For many pages, this issue renders the PDF essentially useless. Indeed, since the web page is single column, why convert to two column for the PDF at all?

212.159.59.5 (talk) 06:58, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Well you could also argue, why even have PDF rendering software any longer. Any mac and modern windows machine can just "Print" to a PDF file right from the Print menu. :) —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:59, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

I have now restored a previous version of the warning which explains that the management process is inactive - the WMF have things they care about more for the foreseeable future. The maths issue is known. Two columns are common in article-based publications of large (e.g. A4) page format, but it is far from universal and I agree that it would be good to be able to override it. I would invite TheDJ to prepare an entire bookful of articles for retail publication, using only their web browser. — Cheers, Steelpillow (Talk) 08:41, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

My point was that if your goal is to print to A4 PDF, that there are some fine solutions out there. When it comes to book print, then it is a layouting issue and a browser, PDF and Latex are all just layouting engines, neither of the three defines an actual layout in itself and definitely not the rules for converting between the 3 different layout systems. I think it's rather clear that WMF and PediaPress are not investing in book print right now, so if this is your interest, you will have to make investments yourself to perfect that. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:32, 1 August 2016 (UTC)