printable / pdf'able pages

[Draadnagel]

On the wiki, there's an extensive section dedicated to the Houses of Westeros. In the books and tv-series there's an emphasis on who comes from which house (consistent with the feudalism theme of this fantasy-setting). I would like to combine all the known houses (and affiliated familymembers) in a book of sorts, for easy reference. Personal and non-commercial use only ofcourse, I like these kind of background books for fantasy and sci-fi settings.

Wikipedia has a userfriendly way of making a pdf 'book' where you can gather pages, make chapters, even name them. Is there a way with this wikisystem to do something similar? Tried to copy - paste into Word, but that takes ages, let alone having to do the layout chapter by chapter, page by page.

Only thing I could find is a 'printable version', but that messes up the layout a lot (f.i. the familytrees get all jumbled).

Appreciate the help. Greetings, Draadnagel

[Scafloc]

As I understand to be able to make books the wiki needs to have the Collection extension. I don't think we have that but there may be a workaround. On wikipedia there is a paragraph mentioning books of multiple wikis. This paragraph links to this page which says it is possible to create books for wikis without the we extension. I have not tried it myself so you would have to check yourself how it works.

[Draadnagel]

Scafloc, thanks for the quick reply. Pediapress is exactly what you need for a wiki that doesn't have the collection: book extension. It works about the same as in Wikipedia. Only thing is it's only available for ordering a 'paper' book (at cost). You can't use it to export the file as a pdf. So almost, but not quite :frown5: I'll keep on searching, somewhere there must be a code you can paste or a program you can run (open source). If you (or anyone else) have further tips, please share.

Thanks again, Draadnagel

[Draadnagel]

Been searching internet for an alternative way to export the contents of the wiki to pdf or another format that can be manipulated for layout. Was close with a thread about mediawiki to InDesign, but alas. Seems the only way to do this is to add an extension to the wiki. Mediawiki has an open source program to use for that, which is easily implemented. Is there anyway to suggest this to the makers of the wiki? Would be awesome to have a background book on the side of the series and books.

[Alexander the Drake]

Okay, this may not really be what you were looking for, but if you've any skill with doing CSS or are willing to learn, then Prince is software that will turn HTML/XML into nicely-formatted PDF.

In the Wikipedia section of their samples page, they've some nifty-looking examples of selected articles rendered to PDF, as well as a stylesheet you can apply to a Wiki entry of your choice for the same output. It doesn't look like it should be too hard to tweak the example CSS to work with the articles here, since they do follow roughly the same layout/structure.

(I had a peek at the source of a randomly selected WoIaF house page, and it looks like reasonably compliant HTML5 with properly closed tags/etc. which Prince's XML parser likely won't choke on. However, the family trees do seem to be formatted via CSS, so you'll probably have to extra work to preserve their display.)

The non-commercial free version puts a watermark logo on the first page of the generated PDF, but that shouldn't be a problem since you want this for personal use. And if you want to get fancy with things, it looks like you should be able to string together multiple input source articles and put in bookmarks linking the various sections together.

Anyway, hope this helps.