Help:Collections

You can collect articles, generate and download a PDF file 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.

Add and remove articles

When you are on an article page, you see a small box titled "collections" 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 PDF files

To download a PDF version of a single article, just go to the article page and click on the "Download as PDF" inside the toolbox on the left.

To download an entire collection as a PDF file, go to the Special:Collection page and click the "Download PDF" button.

Improving PDF Output using Templates

Some articles use wikitext that is not ideal for producing PDFs. 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 three 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]]

Excluding Content

Using the Noprint-template (which is member of the Exclude in print category) is an easy way to mark content that shall be omitted in the PDF.

Example: Some text {{noprint|don't display this chunk}} shown in a PDF.

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 "collections" 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/Subpage|Title to display]]
:[[Third_article]]
;Bar
:[[Fourth_article]]
:[[Fifth_article]]
:[[Sixth_article]]
[[Category:Collections]]

Saved collections can be edited to fix page titles in the PDF.

A page with the name "Page/Name" will have the title "Page/Name" in the PDF. It can be set to "Some Name" using the link syntax

:[[Page/Name|Some Name]] 

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