A while ago I rambled on about Wikis and PDFs, and looked at ways you could generate a PDF book based on a selection of Wiki articles.  The tools and solutions I looked at were... not up to the task so to speak.  The output was a problem, the extension I was toying with was abandoned by its developer, and no one had stepped up to continue with the development.

Then one day someone pointed me to an interesting extension developed by a German company called  PediaPress.  They have built a very nice little (well not so little actually) extension tool set that allows you to build a "collection" and then turn that collection into a nice PDF.

How do you use it?  Well, after installing and configuring the extension you get a nice new menu block on the left side of your Wiki.

Using the Add page link, you can add the page you are currently viewing to your personal Wiki article collection.  If a page you are viewing is already in your collection, the Add link turns into a Remove link.  After you add the pages you want to be a part of you book to the collection, you can click the Show collection link.  This takes you to an overview page that shows you all the pages you have added, and the order you added them in.  You can use the arrows to move pages around.  You can also add a book title and chapter breaks.

When you are done building your collection, you can save it as a personal or community collection.  If you are happy with the collection, you can download the PDF or even have it professionally printed by PediaPress.

One nice extra feature that they have added to this extension is the ability to "blacklist" Wiki Templates.  When you are building a book, some Templates used to organize and display information on the Wiki do not look right, or do not belong in a PDF book.  Adding the Templates you want to be ignored to the PDF blacklist is a quick and easy way to clean up the PDF and make it more readable in print.

Ok, fine, you can generate a PDF, but what does it look like?  Is it actually readable?  Is it just a jumble of text?  This is another area where you can see a lot of time and attention has been put into this extension.  The PDF is very well formatted - especially when you consider how basic the source material is.

The OpenOffice.org Wiki is in the process of implementing this extension so that everyone can build their own PDFs as well as so that we can provide "snapshots" of the various OpenOffice.org manuals and books that are being developed on the Wiki.

Next steps?  Well, how about being able to generate an ODT as well as a PDF?  It's being worked on by PediaPress, and I hope to be able to make this option available soon.
The PediaPress PDF Extension for Media Wiki is found here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection

The early Alpha test version of the ODT export functionality is found here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:OpenDocument_Export