On
[[meta:Book_tool/Feedback#Question:_Formatting]]
it was described a similar problem which happens on Wikisources and it was provided a link to this ticket:
http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/ticket/419

mhershberger wrote:

Unassigning default assignments. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/54734

As I understand the description it is not about problem with rendering but we wish to be able to provide customized table of contents for the book.

It is a problem with the rendering.

the resulting PDF isn't properly formated:

1. In the first situation the chapter's names are formated as if they were subchapters, not as if they were chapters ...

2)The second case shows each title two times (one centralized and one left aligned) ...

It seems to me it is one bug, not two. There is also some misunderstanding of the Wiki syntax as pointed out in the [[:en:Help:Books/Feedback/Archives/2010/March#Bug:_It_is_not_possible_to_define_a_chapter_to_have_only_one_wikipage]].

Semicolon and colon create a definition table, similar (or exactly the same) as HTML's <DL> <DT>...</DT> <DD>....</DD> </DL>.

; starts a "defined term" (<dt>...</dt>)
: starts a "definition of the term (<dd>...</dd>)

"The second case" behaviour is therefore correct - one line should be left aligned and bolded, and the other intended.

Using ; and : is just a convention used by the Special:Book.

Here is my understanding:

It should be possible to attach a single Wiki page on the top level
of the book table of contents hierarchy.

It is then an enhancement request for the JavaScript bookmark editor.

I know that, the point is that Collection extension uses ";" / ":" also to define the structure of the book. And the way it does so currently does not allow use to get the desired formatting for a book when we have a whole chapter consisting of a single page. Even with changes to the front-end, the current parser used for book pages do not produces the right structure for these books.

(In reply to Helder from comment #0)

Maybe the following syntax should work and give the expected results:
;[[Sample book/Sample first chapter|Sample first chapter]]
;[[Sample book/Sample second chapter|Sample second chapter]]
(this was my first try to fix the bug, but unfortunatelly it didn't work)

This is basically http://web.archive.org/web/20110722071901/http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/ticket/705 where volker said:

I strongly support this feature request. If renaming articles would be easy on
the Special:Collection page a couple other problems/feature requests would be
fixed in my option (like #355).

All this would be less painful (for subpage-enabled namespaces) if the BASEPAGENAME was always used by default.

#684 asked the same.

Change 163139 had a related patch set uploaded by Nemo bis:
Respect $wgNamespacesWithSubpages by default

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/163139

Created attachment 16599
Current formatting.odt

The attached ODT file was generated with a collection like

My Title

My Subtitle

;First chapter
:[[My Title/First chapter|First chapter]]

;Second chapter

The page "My Title/First chapter" had this wikitext:

Leading paragraph.

First section

Paragraph.

Subsection

Paragraph.

Second section

Paragraph.

Subsection

Paragraph.

Attached:

Created attachment 16600
Desired formatting.odt

This is how I want it to look like.
I don't really care what the syntax in the collection page should look like, as long as we can have the proper formatting of chapter name in the files, and not have duplicate titles (one from the chapter and another from the page title).

Attached:

Created attachment 16601
Current formatting2.odt

The other alternative we currently have, which is to add the pages (which ARE chapters on Wikibooks) as in

My Title

My Subtitle

:[[My Title/First chapter|First chapter]]

:[[My Title/Second chapter|Second chapter]]

produces an ODF file like the one in this attachment.

Here:

• "My Title/First chapter" has the same content as before
• "My Title/Second chapter" has the content ------------------------------------------------------

Leading paragraph.

First section

Paragraph.

Attached:

Created attachment 16602
Desired formatting2.odt

This is how the second example should look like (i.e. page titles formatted with the style "Chapter").

Attached:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/F79896 is an example of current PDF output for https://it.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Wikisource:Libri/Fiore_di_virt%C3%B9&oldid=1395345