Help:Books
You can collect articles, generate and download a document in one of several formats from article collections or from single articles, order books from a print-on-demand partner and save article collections for later use or to share them.
Contents
Add and remove articles
When you are on an article page, you see a small box titled "collection" on the left. Here you can add the current article (in the currently shown revision) to your collection. If the article has previously been added to the collection you can remove it instead.
Manage the collection
Click "Show collection" to go to the Special:Collection. Here you can manage your collection:
- enter a title and a subtitle for the collection
- create chapters
- rearrange the articles and chapters in the collection
- remove articles and chapters from your collection
- sort the collection (chapter-wise)
Download documents
To download a document in PDF, ODF or DocBook format of a single article, just go to the article page and click on the "Download as ..." inside the toolbox.
To download an entire collection as a document, go to the Special:Collection page, choose the desired format and click the "Download" button.
Improving the output
Some articles use wikitext that is not ideal for producing PDFs. For inline or block content that you do not want to print, simply add the "noprint" class. For example, see the Used car checklist which uses this technique in both the intro section and the outro sections. One important special case is the use of templates that should look different or be omitted in PDF output.
For example all navigational templates should be excluded from PDFs by adding them to the Exclude in print category (see below). As a rule of thumb, all templates containing content which is not useful in an offline version of the document should be marked for exclusion in PDF exports.
There are two ways to utilize templates for a better PDF output:
Substituting templates
One can override a template with another by creating a alternative template with name "PrintSOMETEMPLATE" where SOMETEMPLATE is the name of the original template.
Excluding templates
- Adding it to the special Category:Exclude in print
- Templates in the category Exclude in print are omitted from the output.
- Using the template blacklist
- Templates listed on the template blacklist page are also omitted. The format for this page is in the following form:
* [[Template:Templatename]] * [[Template:SomeOtherTemplatename]]
Order books
You can easily order a book made from your collection. Just click on the links of a print-on-demand partner at the right of the Special:Collection page.
Save and load collections
You have to be logged-in to save a collection. Go to the Special:Collection page, choose whether you want to save the collection as a subpage of your userpage or as a subpage of Wikipedia:Collections, enter a title and click the save button. Collections are automatically added to the Collections category.
If you are on a collection page, the "collection" portlet on the left contains a "Load collection" link to load the shown collection.
Format of saved collection pages
A collection with title "My Collection" and subtitle "Just an Example" consisting of two chapters "Foo" and "Bar" each containing three articles will be saved as a page with the following wikitext:
== My Collection == === Just an Example === ;Foo :[[First_article]] :[[Second_article]] :[[Third_article]] ;Bar :[[Fourth_article]] :[[Fifth_article]] :[[Sixth_article]]
Related Pages
- Special:Collection - the main collection page
- Category:Collections - persisted collections
- Category:Exclude in print - category for templates that should be excluded in exports
- PDF Template Blacklist - page for templates that should be excluded in exports
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