Help:Books/Frequently Asked Questions

Printed books

 * See About printed Wikipedia-Books

Story book
If there any story books Akbar and Birbal.

Why are articles displayed differently from the way they are in the browser?
Books have no scroll bars, while a browser does, so printed content needs to be split up on several pages. To get an acceptable typesetting result, some page elements need to be displayed differently. This may result in some unexpected layouts, especially for tables and parts of wiki articles that use HTML instead of MediaWiki markup.

How can I improve the appearance?
You can edit the wiki articles themselves to make them print better. See Help for Experts and Preparing for export for some ideas.

What is OpenDocument Text?
The OpenDocument format (ODF) is an XML-based file format originally created and implemented by the OpenOffice.org office suite. It is a free and open OASIS standard aimed to replace proprietary file formats such as Microsoft Word .doc and .docx formats.

Storing books in this format is useful if one wants to modify the books. This option allows editors to generate arbitrarily styled books with additional content. Teachers may find this useful.

Which software is required to open this file?
OpenDocument files can be opened with most modern word-processing software, including: OpenOffice, LibreOffice, KOffice, Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 and later. There also is an ODF-AddIn for earlier versions of Microsoft Word.

What is a ZIM file?
A ZIM file is a file using the ZIM open format. This format was created to store Wikimedia projects content for offline reading and retrieval for use on computers, mobile devices, etc. It allows for both a high compression and a rapid retrieval of articles.

Which software is required to open a ZIM file?
Any ZIM file reader will be able to help you. Kiwix is the most used and is available to download for Windows, MacOSX and GNU/Linux.

Where can I find stored books ?
All stored books are placed in Category:PediaPress books. There is also a bookshelf which allows users to explore the list of compiled and shared books.

PDF export

 * link to each article and its version
 * only the wiki contributors are mentioned. If some page has content adapted from other sources, their authors are not mentioned (Bug 28064).
 * images are linked to their image page on the wiki
 * Warning: Authors and licenses of images are not part of the PDF. Therefore, these PDFs cannot be distributed without further manipulation if they contain images.
 * inclusion of the CC-BY-SA (English)

Printed books

 * URL of each article and its version
 * only the wiki contributors are mentioned. If some page has content adapted from other sources, their authors are not mentioned (Bug 28064).
 * URL of each image
 * all contributors of an image are mentioned
 * license name of the image is mentioned
 * inclusion of the CC-BY-SA (English)

Can I use the book tool with my MediaWiki installation?
Yes, the book tool is based on the open source project mwlib. The MediaWiki component Collection extension works out of the box with most MediaWikis and the PediaPress service.

How do I delete my book?

 * If you saved your book in your userspace (e.g. Special:mypage/Books/My book), you can simply request deletion by placing sdelete on top of the page.
 * If you saved your book in the book namespace (e.g. Book:Foobar), several options are possible.
 * If you created the book by mistake or as a test, or if you are the only person to edit the book, place sdelete at the top of the page
 * If someone else (other than bots) edited the page, then you need to follow the steps listed at Proposed deletions.

Skin support
The tool currently only works with the Monobook, Modern and Vector skins.

Limitation of the book size
Printed books can not contain more than 500 articles, will contain 800 pages per volume (books more than 800 pages long will be split over two or more volumes). The A5 books have approximately double the number of pages than the equivalent A4 PDF.

Please keep in mind that generation of large PDFs can take a long time and results in high server load. Dividing article collections into multiple books might be a solution.

Large tables
Large tables are printed at full page size, not "floated" to the side as on the Web. This is a result of the limited size of A5 paper: if the table was shrunk to fit, the text within would be illegible.

CSS & HTML
CSS and HTML used in the wiki markup are only partially evaluated when generating PDFs. Templates can be adjusted for print to avoid some of the problems, see Help for Experts for details.

TeX formulas
In PDF exports, math-tags are rendered as raster images and not in print-quality due to technical limitations.

Bugs and general feedback
Bugs, feature requests and questions are best reported at the talk page.

Proofread texts
Until January 12, 2012, the book creation tool was incompatible with the proofreading tool, which is widely used on Wikisource. This error prevented the creation of any book containing texts generated by proofreading (including all of the best quality texts on Wikisource). This is no longer the case but it is the reason very few books were created until that date.

Labeled Section Transclusion
The book tool current does not support Labeled Section Transclusion. This is used for many texts on Wikisource to split chapters (and other sections) onto separate pages. This may result in the beginning or end of a chapter appearing to "overflow" into another chapter or appear to repeat.