Fileref

Can we please get a proper Bookref?

Asking for a hybrid of Magref and Fileref for books, since physical pages need to be noted for Sega Arcade History that aren't aligned to PDF pages. Also because we might want to yank some of what's on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Cite_book in terms of what's shown in the reference section.

And also because I can't really pull apart the Cargo vs. non-Cargo bits and don't know if you want to make a Cargo table for books themselves. - Scarred Sun (talk) 20:58, 17 August 2019 (EDT)

I'm hesitant only because the magazine templates are a bit unwieldy in their current form, and there are many many many many many books. Also we've given codes to magazines so we don't have to hard-code in PDFs, but that system could break down with the many many many many books. ISBNs would be unique identifier... except not all of our books have ISBNs.

But you're right - we do kinda need one, and if you want all the information about authors and ISBNs and whatever we'll probably need a cargo template for that. That being said, the most logical way of getting that information in there is to modify template:BookBob, but that's only going to work for books that have pages - all the multi-platform Retro CDN stuff will be missing (until the database starts covering multiple wikis at least).

(p.s. I'd quite like to see that Sega Arcade History scan split so the pages do line up - I don't suppose we have a reliable "Retro" method for doing this? (I was using a crappy program that purposely fails half the time to get you to buy the full version - I have no confidence it'll play ball with 700MB files)) -Black Squirrel (talk) 06:08, 18 August 2019 (EDT)

Well, I'll put it this way--if we can get something sorted out for book references, it's pretty trivial to fix everything in Category:Dead_external_reference. As far as splitting pages go, I strongly recommend using cdn:File:Vertical_Image_Splitter.7z--heck, I'll give running it against the book a shot tonight since I've already got it downloaded. For reference, I use https://www.4dots-software.com/free-pdf-image-extractor/ for extractions. - Scarred Sun (talk) 19:28, 19 August 2019 (EDT)

File usage

I got rid of the hidden span text because I want refs to only be refs with no extra text. The downside is that files start appearing in unusedfiles. I do have a longer-term plan to deal with this invloving the cargo table I created. Basically, file pages will contain an extra template which checks for file usage on the cargo table. - Hivebrain (talk) 15:41, 1 February 2020 (EST)

Fair enough - as long as there's a plan -Black Squirrel (talk) 15:46, 1 February 2020 (EST)