Topic on Talk:Reading/Web/PDF Rendering

As a Wikivoyage editor, I think we would be disappointed to see most of the features listed under "Implications" lost. We maintain printability as a major goal of the site, so features that make the PDF look more like a professionally printed book and less like a printed-out webpage are highly valued. Also, as a travel site, we expect our users who print our guides to want a portable format, meaning something quite a bit smaller than A4.

Speaking personally, I think features like tables of contents and indices are extremely useful and it would be nice to retain the former and add the latter.

As an aside, Wikivoyage's predecessor site did in fact have a series of guides printed and sold as part of a separate for-profit business that licensed the name. As a former editor of one of those guides, there are a number of features of our wiki-to-print conversion that those of us at Wikivoyage would continue to find useful.

• Custom chapters
  • The book comprised multiple chapters, each of which corresponded to a different travel guide article. The table of contents included second-level headings from the articles.
• Automatic index generation
  • The program would parse the wikitext for bolded words and phrases and automatically place them into the index, with page numbers. At my request, the program was modified to allow custom index entries using a dummy template inserted into the wikitext.
• Image formatting
  • Images from the article had a variety of formatting options, which were specified as dummy parameters in the wikitext invocation. Since the books were printed in a two-column format, images could be placed inline in a single column, spanning two columns at the top or bottom of the page, above the chapter title as the lead image, two per page on a dedicated image page, full-page, or spanning two full pages. Images could be rotated if necessary to fit the book format.
• Web-only or print-only content
  • Content, including images, could be designated web-only (using a special template that just passed the parameter through unchanged) or print-only (by using HTML comments).
• Page breaks
  • Manual page breaks could be entered for layout purposes. The software also kept headings with their following text rather than orphaning them on a previous page or column.
• Automatic page headings
  • The chapter title and current section appeared at the outside top corner of each page (except the first page of a chapter).
• Automatic hyphenation

You can read more about it at voy:Wikivoyage:Wikitravel Press. This blog post is also instructive, though it contains few technical details.

@LtPowers Thanks for this! It is very useful. I will be sure to add them to the list of desired features (in progress). Which of these are live currently?

@Jkatz (WMF), I'm not sure what you mean by "live". Wikitravel Press is no longer a going concern and so the software that formatted the Wiki guides for print is no longer running.

Thanks, that answers my question. By "live" I meant "running". #jargon

Oh, I know what "live" means. Perhaps I should have queried what you meant by "these". ;)