Help talk:FAQ/Readers

Initial text adapted from w:Wikipedia:Readers' FAQ --mav 01:45, 19 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Download articles
The question Can I get Wikibooks on CD, or download it for offline use? really needs a better answer. I can think of several textbooks that I have spent well over a hundred hours reading. That is an insane amount of time to spend online for something that is probabably about 100 KB in length (a sub minute download time). Downloading the entire database and setting up a mysql database, a http server, php ... is a huge overkill for one book. I should be able to choose a book, download a zip or pdf of the html and then browse at my leisure later. Many people who use these books will want to not pay per minute connection fees or will want to use it on their laptop away from a network connection. I personally consider wikibooks useless from a reader's point of view until there is someway to download One text book and read it later offline. Ditto for being able to print one text book. --Anon


 * That requires software that has not been coded yet. But all that is planned. It will be some time before we have our first nearly complete book anyway so this isn't a pressing issue right now. --mav 08:48, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)


 * Has this question been re-examined yet? There are now several books that are more or less complete, and at the very least, those should be packaged up and be made available for download in a nice pdf (or whatever, ps if it floats one's boat). This could be done manually, but I don't see why there couldn't be a simple script to convert the wiki markup into LaTeX (add in all the nicities like a chapter index and such automatically), then use that to generate both a PDF and HTML document. Zip those up, upload them to the site, and there you go. Run that once a day or so, and things should be up to date as well. --Kish 08:10, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Two years after the beginning of this discussion, there seems to be still no way to get a PDF/LaTex/whatever file containing a wikibook. Is it still planned or should we forget about that and remain with reduced usability for these books? -- 20 Jul 2005


 * Until one can download a book this site is really pretty useless as a "book site" compared to old-fashioned sites. Other book-like documents, even when split up in multiple pages, can usually be downloaded somehow - e.g. with wget of a directory and its subdirectores.  Text here can be read on-line, but not conveniently as books which is what the site claims to provide.  For authors to "prepare a print version" or whatever isn't very good either since that will presumably become outdated.  Asking people do download the whole site doesn' scale well either, even if you get it to work without needing to run SQL and whatnot.  My guess is that however much work it is, you need to reorganize so each book resides in its own directory.  That way wiki pages get auto-sorted into their correct book. 129.240.186.42 13:31, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Related to the above discussion, the answer to How do I print a wikibook? is not really very helpful for printing a whole book. Nearly every book is broken up into separate URLs, which means printing each URL separately. Obviously this isn't the end of the world, but it's not exactly user-friendly either. - Qaphsiel 19:58, 3 October 2005 (UTC)

Possible replacement
I have to say, as a long time "linux" user, I am truly horrified by that section on downloading a wikibook. First off, it seems like fully half of it is involved in setting up a directory in the root directory (bad bad bad bad!) and then in undoing it rather then simply create the directory in one's home directory in the first place and never have to worry about permissions and ownership thereafter; then it goes on to suggest that you should manually download each and every HTML page (badly!) and then cluelessly explains about a quoting error (which must then immediately be rectified). This last line just makes me want to wail in agony and tear out my eyes: "You can place a new item on yor dektop for your wikibook. To do this you hit the right mouse key on a free space of your desktop frame. Choose New, File and Link to (URL). As the URL adress just put in /wiki/nameofthebook."

Here's a replacement, dependent on having wget installed. cd ; mkdir wikibooks/ ; mkdir wikibooks/NAME_OF_WIKIBOOK/ && cd wikibooks/NAME_OF_WIKIBOOK/ && mkdir en.wikibooks.org && touch en.wikibooks.org/robots.txt && wget -kp --recursive --html-extension -l 2 --no-clobber -np -- http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/NAME_OF_WIKIBOOK && cp -r en.wikibooks.org/wiki/NAME_OF_WIKIBOOK/* en.wikibooks.org/ && rm -rf en.wikibooks.org/wiki

One could script this as well. The body of the script would be: cd ; mkdir wikibooks/ ; mkdir wikibooks/$1/ ; cd wikibooks/$1/ && mkdir en.wikibooks.org && touch en.wikibooks.org/robots.txt && wget -kp --recursive --html-extension -l 2 --no-clobber -np -- http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/$1 && cp -r en.wikibooks.org/wiki/$1/* en.wikibooks.org/ && rm -rf en.wikibooks.org/wiki and then a chmod +x script-name.sh ; sh script-name.sh NAME_OF_WIKIBOOK

(This is a bit baroque, so I'll explain; the mkdir and touch are necessary so that the robots.txt file will exist before wget begins its download with the --no-clobber option forcing it to accept our fake blank robots.txt and ignore the real one on wikibooks which would tell wget to not do any recursive downloads. Of course, that's exactly what we want to do. The wget invocation does a two-level recursive download which appends .html to all HTML files and downloads all prerequisites for viewing a file while rewriting all URL links to point to the local copy if possible. However, a two-level recursive download has the major defect that many many files under the en.wikibooks.org/wiki/ will be downloaded but not needed! However, if you change "-l 2" to the much faster and fewer downloads of "-l 1", then any subdirectories would fail to be downloaded. For example, in the Haskell book, -l 1 would not download Haskell/Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours.)

Obviously, some testing would be good. This leaves a mess in the en.wikibook.org subdirectory and so far I've only tested it on Bash and my system. --maru (talk) contribs 03:18, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Related to How to Print a WikiBook
It would be really nice if someone made a script such that a reader can select a book to be printed by one of the ondemand printers, such as Lulu.

Please help me to translate this sentence
I have been translating this page to Turkish. But I couldn't figure out this sentence:

Cite it as you would any other web page in accordance with the normal citation practice the publication you are submitting the paper to follows.

Could anyone say what this sentence say? 78.164.208.224 (talk) 22:14, 8 May 2010 (UTC)