LinuxTent

Once you have laser network printer without any upper limit, your appetite of reading will start to increase. Within one month my office converted to a mess of articles, papers, books, and problems. However, Wikipedia is still my favorite source of reading. In Wikipedia no more fear to read more about anything you want or you do not; everything is explained by clicking on the new term that frightened you. Wikiing becomes a trend which is being included in new and special gadgets like Kindle. Moreover, such luxury is not available everywhere and having Internet while you are in a bus is far from being achieved in the near future [at least in TRNC].

I searched for a long time for a solution to make Wikipedia printed articles more elegant and practical. For example, if you want to print the printable version of the USA article this will cost you 47 page ! Changing the printing font size in Firefox browser helps. However, the printed article structure is far from being elegant: you have many white space areas and a photo or table may occupy consecutive pages in ugly and scattered way.

Apparently, there is no available firefox addons that can change the style of wikipedia article to suitable format. I think CSS and the new web fonts can be in great help [I am not sure]. PediaPress made good efforts with Wikimedia to make a new extension that allow you to collect the articles you want to be printed in one pdf file. You can also order a printed copy from pediapress. This extension which is called [collection] or [wiki-to-print] is enabled in English Wikibooks, French, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simple English wikipedias. According to scalability issues this extension is not available directly in English Wikipedia. You can use the extension in English Wikipedia in one of these ways:

1. Collection extension is available to logged in users of English Wikiepedia. Using this solution:
   USA artcile printed in 44 pages with images in one column , the file size is 8 MB.
2. Use the pedia button in the collection extension. Using this solution:
   USA article printed in 26 pages without images in one column. The file size is 581KB
   

Moreover, I found superior solution to print wikipedia articles. Prince provide neat conversion method for HTML, XML files that generates pdf files. The software is cross platform and has a cli. Running the following command generates a pdf file for the USA article in 28 pages with images in 2 columns. The file size is 1.3MB.

rami@rami-desktop:~$ prince --no-author-style
-s http://www.princexml.com/howcome2008/wikipedia/wiki2.css
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usa -o usa.pdf

I used the prince software to print the wikipedia article on Neural Networks. Once Shariq saw the output, he said it is like a conference paper. Mustafa replied that it is even in a better quality.