Help:Books/Workarounds

Direct transclusion
Pages are normally transcluded from the Page namespace by use of a tag. For example:

This will bring the text from those pages and combine them in the main namespace page. However, the book tool does not get the text. Instead it prints the code as it appears above. On the other hand, the book tool does understand templates. This can be used by treating each page in the Page namespace as a template. For example:

The resulting page can be used with the book tool. The most obvious drawback is that Wikisource texts can have hundreds of pages, which can make transcluding each page individually a tedious task.

Copy & Paste
A variation on direct transclusion is to copy the text of the mainspace page and paste it into a user sandbox (a subpage of your own user page, eg. User:Yourname/sandbox). The user page can then be used as the basis for book creation using the book tool instead of the main text.

Copying and pasting will remove all of the typesetting. This can be re-entered manually but this again becomes a tedious task if there is extensive typesetting in the text

Internet Archive
If you want a PDF file, or possibly another file format, but not a printed book, it may be possible to go to a source text on the Internet Archive. Many texts produced with the proofreading tool are based on DjVu files downloaded from the archive. If you can find the appropriate file on the archive should be able to get the file in format you desire as they derive many different formats from their scans.

For every proofread text there will be an original file in the File namespace; for instance, Index:Book.djvu (or Page:Book.djvu/#) will be based on File:Book.djvu. This page may have link back to the archive under the source parameter of the information box. You can also try to find the file you want by either searching with the archive's internal search system or with an external search engine.

However, the files from the archive have not been proofread by a human being. Their automatic OCR creates frequent errors and omissions that will be reflected in all of their files (hence why Wikisource uses the proofreading tool in the first place).