On Sat, 2010-12-04 at 13:59 +1000, Jean Hollis Weber wrote: > On Sat, 2010-12-04 at 08:40 +0530, Narayan Aras wrote: > > > > prediapress is running a successful "Print-on-Demand" business out of > > printing books from wikis. > > ... > > > > Each book is nothing but an exported pdf from wiki.... > > > > So professional formatting in exported pdfs may not be an issue. > > Do these books have many illustrations, tables, and other features, or > are they mostly words and/or code samples? Wiki info that is simple can > be exported easily and with good results. Wiki info that is not simple > can look very amateurish and ugly when exported. If Pediapress can do a > good job with the OO/LibO user guides, then that is great. But I'll > believe it when I see it. (I don't have time to look at any of the books > in their catalog to see if I am wrong.)
More info on the PediaPress extension: I've now found that the OOo wiki is already using it. As I said above, ODTs and PDFs exported from the wiki are very poor for complex books like the user guides. For example, in addition to other layout problems I mentioned, I now recall that if you aggregate multiple pages into the PDF output, you lose the hierarchy, especially once you include several chapters. One can export the Wiki to ODT and clean up the result, but the cleanup is a lot of work. I had thought that less work was needed for the OOo Basic Guide, the OOo Admin Guide, and and the Developer's Guide, but I was wrong. The person who does the work says it varies from manageable (on a small doc like the Admin Guide) to a very long process for the large Developer's Guide. So I repeat what I said earlier: the PediaPress extension to MedaiWiki may work well with some fairly simple Wiki page sources, but when you have complex formatting the output starts to look VERY amateurish and unprofessional. There are ways to work around this, but not quickly and easily. Going the other way, from ODT to wiki, is also a lot of work but the results in multiple outputs are much better. --Jean -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] List archive: http://www.libreoffice.org/lists/documentation/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***
