Thread:Talk:PDF rendering/Architecture/Simple set up for casual MediaWiki users/reply (2)

You are correct though that this solution does require Parsoid. I feel that it is a reasonable requirement, more and more features for MediaWiki are requiring it (VisualEditor and Flow are the big ones.)

In the bigger context, something has to parse the wikitext into usable output. We can't just take the output from the api.php?action=render because it doesn't provide enough semantic information (I have no idea what that API is designed to be used for, but it's clearly not this.) Maybe in the future we will be able to use a similar native API call; but I only have till the 22nd to come up with something usable for the WMF.