Books

Wiki pages can be displayed as a structured book with chapter navigation. A book can also be printed as a PDF file with a cover sheet.

Characteristics

YouTube: Books (5:22 min.)

Books have the following characteristics:

• On book pages, the book navigation is displayed instead of the main navigation.
• A wiki page can be in multiple books. If a page is in multiple books, the book navigation shows a dropdown menu that allows to switch between these books.
• Books can be printed completely or partially as a PDF with a cover sheet.
• Books can be grouped into individual bookshelves.

Differences to previous versions

• A page can now be in multiple books.
• The books are displayed as thumbnails and can be organized on different "shelves".
• There are no more "own" or "temporary" books since these were edge use cases. Own books will not get lost after updating to BlueSpice 4.5, but rather be stored as a list of links on subpages of the user profile page (e.g., User:JaneDoe/...).
• There is no option to duplicate a book since this was also an edge use case.
• There is no more separate book manager. All books can now be managed directly from the Books page.

Creating a book

Books are created from the page Special:Books.

"Create new book"

To create a book:

1. Click Create new book in the actions menu of the page tools. This opens a dialog box.
2. Enter a book title.
3. Enter a subtitle (optional).
4. Select a bookshelf (optional). This puts the book in a group of books. If you do not select a bookshelf, the book will be listed under the heading Various books.
5. Upload or select a cover image (optional). If you do not upload or select a cover image, a random cover image will be applied.
6. Click Save. The book is now shown in its bookshelf group and can be edited.
7. Click Done. The book editor loads next.

Dialog box

"New" button

Alternatively, you can create a book via the "+" button. The next steps to save the book are as described above.

New book menu item

Editing a book

To switch to the book edit mode, click Edit in the book preview on the Books page.

This opens the book editor.

Adding elements

To add a wikipage to a book:

1. Click Add element.
2. Select the node type Wiki page chapter.
3. Enter the name of the wikipage you want to add in the field Target.
4. Enter the label you want show for the page in the field Text.
5. Click Done. The page is added to the end of the book.
6. Drag-and-drop the page to the desired section.
7. Repeat steps 1-6 if you want to add another page.
8. Click Save when you are done.

Editing meta data

While editing a book (adding or removing pages), metadata for the book can be added. References to these metadata can be included in the PDF template. The following table shows which of the Paramters are by default part of the PDF-Printout. All Paramters are part of the user-defined document properties of the printed PDF.

Meta data and their functionality

Parameter	Beschreibung	in Standard-Vorlagen
Author 1	User-defined PDF-document property. Not included in PDF pages.	no
Author 2	User-defined PDF-document property. Not included in PDF pages.	no
Bookshelf	Lists the book on the Books page of the wiki under a particular bookshelf. It has no relevance for the printed PDF.	no
Bookshelf Image	Image that is shown as preview image. It can be used as cover image of the printed PDF in the Cloud.	yes (cloud only)
Department	User-defined PDF-document property. Not included in PDF pages.	no
Document type	User-defined PDF-document property. Not included in PDF pages.	no
Document-ID	Manually assigned document ID.	no
PDF export template	By default, there is only one book PDF template (BlueSpice Book). If custom PDF templates exist (possible in on-premise hosting only), they are listed as options.	no
Subtitle	Printed on the cover page.	yes
Title	Printed on cover page. Overwrites the book title of the wiki for the PDF-printout. It will be used as PDF file name and title on the cover page.	yes
Version	Manually assigned book version number.	no

Mass adding pages

After clicking "Mass add", a dialog is opened. It contains different criteria for page selection:

• All pages of a category: All pages of a category are added at the end of the book (regardless of whether some of the pages already exist in the book).
• All subpages of a certain page: After selecting a page, all its subpages are added at the end of the book.
• From a page collection: Page collections are lists of pages located in the MediaWiki namespace. They an be created from a Word import or from search results.

Moving chapters:Currently, it is not possible to move multiple mass-added pages together to a different location in the book. To rearrange the chapters, you can open the book in source editing mode and copy-and-paste chapters to reorder the book pages.

Exporting a book

To download the book as PDF:

Click Export on the Books page. This immediately downloads the book.

To download individual chapters:

1. Go to the entrypoint Pages. If your wiki does not show this link, go directly to the page Special:Pages.
2. Click on a book name.
3. Select the chapters you want to export.
4. Click Export above the chapter tree.

The book is then downloaded.

More actions

The More actions button allows to delete, assign, or edit the metadata of the book.

Button "more actions"

Chapter

This takes you to the tree structure of the book. This allows you to export individual chapters:

1. Select the individual chapters using the selection boxes.
2. Click Export.

The chapters are downloaded with a cover page and their original chapter numbering.

Delete

When you delete a book, you only remove the book page of the book (that is, the table of contents) in the "Book" namespace. The wiki pages in the book are not deleted and they are no longer associated with the book.

Edit metadata

This provides the same functionality as the button Edit metadata in the menu editor.

Assign

A book page can be assigned to individual users or usergroups like any other wiki page. The book will then show up under the user's assignments in the user menu.

Including a book table of contents on a page   v4.4+

The Content droplet “Book table of contents” can be used to insert the an entire book TOC or an individual chapter navigation of a book on any wiki page.

Content droplet "Book table of contents"

Adding a PDF-download link to a page

The Content droplet “Book PDF link” can be used to insert a link on a page that will download a book directly as a PDF.

Permissions

To create and edit books, users need edit rights in Book namespace. Additionally, a user can only add pages to the book that that user can read. If a user tries to export a book to PDF that contains pages for which the user does not have permissions, the user will get an error message.

Configuration

Display options

Book

• Show chapter pager after content: Displays previous/next book page navigation at the end of each book page. (1)
• Show chapter pager before content: Displays previous/next book page navigation at the beginning of each book page. (2)
  

  

  Book navigation

  
  
• Use display title from book source on article: Shows the title from the book navigation as page title instead of the page name.
  

book display title

Note:If the page additionally contains a {{DISPLAYTITLE}} tag, the display title of the page is shown on the page and in the book navigation instead of the page label provided in the book page.

• Prepend article table of contents and headlines with book numberation: The page TOC does not start with the main heading 1, but with the actual number from the book chapter (see screenshot).

Prepended chapter numbers

Export

• Default export template for books: The default template for books is used if the export template is not explicitely set for a book export (e.g. in the book metadata).

Skinning

• Show entrypoint "Books": Adds a link to the page Special:Books to the main navigation entrypoints.

Export

Wiki administrators can make the following adjustments for the book export:

• Default export template for books: The default template for books is used if the export template is not explicitely set for a book export (e.g. in the book metadata).

• Show watermark in PDF: Shows the watermark for expired pages in PDFs.

• Show stabilization information in PDF export:
  Prints the timestamp for the last approved version below the page headings in the PDF (date of approval and date of last edit before approval).
  

Configuring the file size limits (server)

By default, the book export is limited to 50MB in file size. To adjust this value, complete the following steps:

1. In Apache Tomcat, open the file web.xml:

   sudo -s
   nano /opt/tomcat/webapps/manager/WEB-INF/web.xml
   

2. Look for the following lines and adjust the value (e.g. for 250MB=26214400)

   <max-file-size>262144000</max-file-size>
   <max-request-size>262144000</max-request-size>
   

3. The web app BShtml2PDF also has a setting that needs to be adjusted:

   nano /opt/tomcat/webapps/BShtml2PDF/WEB-INF
   

4. Enter your values in the following lines:

   <param-name>maxMemSize</param-name> <param-value>26214400</param-value>
   <param-name>maxFileize</param-name> <param-value>26214400</param-value>
   

5. Restart Apache Tomcat

   service tomcat restart
   

Related info

• PDF export

PDF exclude - start

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PDF exclude - end

The display title sets a page title that is different from the page name.

It becomes the preferred page label used in many automatically generated page lists. It can be changed with the visual editor (Options > Advanced settings). The source of the wiki page shows the magic word {{DISPLAYTITLE:My display title}}.