Reading/Web/PDF Rendering

About
Currently rendering pdf articles from Wikipedia pages is handled by extension Collection through an embedded service called OCG, and it has different issues, especially with tables. The Wikimedia foundation would like to work on enhancing the end result of the rendered pdfs, in a way that meets the community needs. The technology solution that meets our needs is to ￼￼move from OCG￼￼ to Electron, an underlying service that supports browser based rendering.

In this page, we are laying out the problem, and our proposed solution, the plan below is tentative, just to give clarity around tasks vs timeline, please feel free to add your comments and suggestions accordingly. This work is part of the WMDE lead initiative on enhancing tables in PDF printing.

When you click "Download as PDF" on the side menu, a screen similar to the below is displayed, where a the pdf is available for download shortly after the article is ready. The result will be mainly lacking table proper render.

For example, check the rendered pdf for the article on list of country codes which contains a big table, that is not captured at all by the current rendering service.

Technology alternatives
OCG is currently not well supported by the WMF and there are difficulties with Latex that have disabled table rendering in pdfs. Latex is a fairly brittle framework which is not well-suited to our flexible content-types. Furthermore, bugs in OCG or the Collection extension have greatly diminished the 3rd use of OCG (creating books). Please check earlier OCG discussion here and here
 * OCG, the service that is currently used basically does the following:
 * 1) Converts wikitext pages to latex-formatted-pdf and plain text. In the past, it has also supported zim, epub and possibly more
 * 2) When integrated with the collection extension, collates articles selected by a user into books + creates a table of contents

In the future, moving to a browser based PDF rendering solution such as electron, will be an option that enhances both PDF out put and maintenance. The new service will be responsible for the underlaying PDF conversion, without major changes to user workflow.

Current status

 * Mediawiki has deployed changes to the how printing PDF works
 * New PDF styling is available for review above
 * A proposed workflow of all technical details is elaborately explained here