Talk:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality/2018/02

About giving feedback

Please read Reading/Web/PDF Functionality and comment on the plans we lay out there, to tell us what you need from the PDF service. We're especially interested in what you need in the future that doesn't exist in the plans laid out there – if there's a bug with something that should work right now (e.g. you get an error message when you try to create a PDF), we need to fix it, of course, but that would have been on the agenda.

Updates: (24 February 2018)

- Kerning and spacing issues (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178665): there has been a few reports on spacing issues within PDF rendering. The readers web team is currently looking into a solution. We will first be updating the fonts for PDFs (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T181200) over the week of November 27. This will resolve some but not all of the spacing issues. We'll be looking further into the remaining issues after the initial fix.

- Update on the book creator. We're still in the process of performance testing the new renderer (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178278). Once this stage is complete, we will be able to provide more details on its capacity to render books.

Color issue with article HSL and HSV

In the article HSL and HSV <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV> all the colors at the section 'swatches' <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV#Swatches> are not rendered at all. Note that this also happens when printing the page with a pdf printer such as PDFCreator. 81.13.254.237 (talk) 23:44, 5 February 2018 (UTC)

This is because browsers don't print background colors and images. This is expected browser print behaviour. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 16:02, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

1) When I use PDFCreator, in all my browsers, I have the option 'print background color and images' ticked on and it does not work anyway. Is there a way to have this work? I have the same options enabled and I get the same output when I use the Wikipedia button 'downlad as PDF'.

2) Of course, if I use PDFCreator (or any other similar pieces of software), I expect the output being browser dependent (and browser options dependent). On the other hand, when I push on the button 'download as PDF', I expect the process not being dependent on any browser options or print behavior: this is a feature kindly provided by Wikipedia and it should have nothing to do with a browser printing behavior. 81.13.254.237 (talk) 22:34, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

The Wikipedia option is just a browser creating a print using PDFCreator on the serverside  :)

The problem here is that it is hard to distinguish backgrounds that you want to include from backgrounds that you don't want to include. There is no method to make that distinction. This will be an unsolvable problem for some years to come still. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 10:13, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your explanations. 81.13.254.237 (talk) 12:20, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Current English one is awesome! Good job guys.

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Thank you for finally putting effort into the formatting of the pdf generator. 72.39.44.144 (talk) 04:07, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. Johan (WMF) (talk) 14:21, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Cannopt download PDF

page "King's Indian Defense" cannot download as a PDF 173.56.103.114 (talk) 19:15, 7 February 2018 (UTC)

Opera 12.18 (works mostly good, but out of date) dosn't download PDF-Files

Vivaldi 1.14 (my opinion, may be the follow up of Opera) download of PDF is ok. 85.180.249.213 (talk) 12:54, 17 June 2018 (UTC)

I can't either download it 160.165.198.173 (talk) 07:38, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Rendering Fails and no pdf is createt 195.225.33.4 (talk) 13:30, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

I can download the King's Indian Defense article as a PDF just fine. There are some minor formatting niggles, but the page looks complete. The download function is definitely working as expected.

Users should note that:

1. There is a screen warning about the formatting issues, so you have to click a button in there before the page download starts.
2. The Book functions are disabled, so don't expect the "Create a book" option to provide a download.

Any other problems downloading this article will be a user's browser or local firewall issue.

Some other articles have failed in the past due to font issues. If you have a problem with a different article that is not one of the above, please start a new topic. Steelpillow (talk) 17:38, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

tanks 154.147.186.211 (talk) 21:47, 25 July 2018 (UTC)

Missing Page number

There is one of the most important aspect of a document missing which is pager number. It may someone wants to print a PDF file. Printing it without page number! 5.235.181.192 (talk) 13:18, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Noted. Johan (WMF) (talk) 14:19, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

with http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ page numbering works Dirk Hünniger (talk) 14:38, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

nice to know 很高兴知道 120.29.100.158 (talk) 16:22, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

missing spaces, overwritten text...yet with a solution

trying page 'Extended Backus–Naur form' . It has the above defects, ie white space missing between some words and some words written over other words, leaving it still readable with a bit of head scratching but with a lingering doubt that the sections of reproduced code are correct.

My solution, using the 'printable version' option and printing to PDF...much better. Jp in England (talk) 14:49, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

We have spacing issues, yes. Working on them.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178665 Johan (WMF) (talk) 14:18, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

The pictures qualitiy are so low

I cannot see clearly picture that contain chemical structure or a flow chart 101.127.206.24 (talk) 10:50, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Any news about PDF Functionality?

The message "We're currently preparing performance tests of the PDF to book function. We should know more in early February. " is still there, can you give us a estimate date when the PDF Funcionality starts working again? 94.126.240.2 (talk) 11:54, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

We'll update as soon as we know more! Johan (WMF) (talk) 17:03, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

I am looking forward to the updated functionality. I'll just be patient another few weeks. Thank you! 2600:8800:7B05:F900:1884:58A7:3A22:8A35 (talk) 17:40, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

ODT

I think it should be clarified that ODT support is also offline, the current language seems to imply only PDF is offline, but in reality only Pediapress is online. Albnaose (talk) 14:57, 15 February 2018 (UTC)

Workaround for Adding Pages to Book Creator Project

If you have been experiencing problems in trying to Add Pages to Book, as I have, I believe I have found a consistent workaround to allow this process to function correctly every attempt. Although this advice may be redundant, I thought I would share my experiences, so that the Wikipedia Community can continue to utilize the Create Book function, while the Project is being fine-tuned.

i noticed that I was only able to add certain pages to my book, so after much trial and error, I found a workaround, allowing a person the ability to Add any Page to their Book. First, when you are on a particular page, which you would like to add to your book, you need to click on the “Create Book” Link at the left of the page on the Desktop version of Wikipedia. It will then ask if you would like to continue with your current book, with “x” Number of Pages, at which point you select the “Ok” radio button. You will be brought to the “Book Creator” page, which describes the Create Book function and contains a list of all of your Saved Pages for your Book.

Once you find yourself on this page, you need to enter the Topic of the previous page, which you were looking to add to your book, into the Search Box at the Upper Top Right within the Desktop Version once again. You will see a List of Topics, however if you have typed correctly, the page you are looking for should be the Top Result. Once you click on that Topic, you will be brought back to the prior page, which you were attempting to Add to your Book. However, this time, the “Add This Page to My Book” link will appear at the top middle of the page. Once you see the link, you can add that Page, and others moving forward.

I have found that this somehow restores the Book Creator to its original form. Should you experience trouble getting this function to continue to work, you will need to repeat these steps, using the Desktop Vesion, if you are on Mobile, until the process reboots itself. This has worked flawlessly for me, and should also work for you as well, until this excellent feature is up and working again full time.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like further explanation or assistance with this matter, as I am more than willing to help out where I can. I would also like to take this opportunity to Give Thanks and Praises to the Members of the Group responsible for the Book and PDF Creation Project, as I believe this capability is by far, one of the most exciting achievements for the WikiMedia Foundation. With this ability, not only has it changed the landscape for Learning, but also has reached new heights for Internet based Encyclopedias. I would be extremely interested in being part of the Team assisting with this Project, please let me know how I can help.

Regards,

~~~~Mark Halsey Markhalsey (talk) 17:47, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

It would be very helpful if the "Printable version", "Download as PDF", and simply printing to a color printer would all support color. Very many Wikipedia pages use colors in very important ways, especially to highlight different meanings in tables (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index). I could be wrong, but it seems to me that pages used to print in color, but don't seem to now. A related or maybe even more useful functionality would be a link to export to Excel (including color formatting). I think I've copied and pasted color tables via HTML into Excel, then printed them. So that's a reasonable work-around. Thanks for everybody's very helpful efforts! 142.254.39.248 (talk) 22:30, 19 February 2018 (UTC)

Unfortunately, this is a limitation of browser based printing (and Download as PDF, uses a browser on the server side to generate the PDF). The browser vendors do not give us options to fix this. Also, color should never be a critical information element, as that would mean that you have made the information inaccessible to those with color blindness, or making use of screenreader software. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 15:05, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

Utilizar un navegador en el servidor, nos permite solucionar problemas de PDF. Es algo interesante. Korriskoso-vnt (talk) 02:26, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

out of the frying pan and into the fire

While I appreciate that WP got rid of the two column layout and the lack of tables in PDF output, I miss the quality of the LaTeX generated PDFs. The typographical problems already are discussed but there is another issue. Even vector Images like [1] (used on page "Spiral model", inserting the link doesn't work here "page does not exist") are included in a rasterized version. The resolution is appropriate only for screen display but generally too low, to e.g. read contained text in the printout. Thus they often are useless. BerlinSight (talk) 10:14, 20 February 2018 (UTC)

This is a known problem, tracked as T178664 —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 15:02, 21 February 2018 (UTC)

OK, I see. Yet I think WP is wasting time reinventing the wheel. TeX/LaTeX is a professional quality typesetting system, which is Free / Open Source Software and contains decades of work. My prediction is Electron will never reach the point TeX already is WRT typographic quality. IMHO leaving the user with two options for generating PDFs (one with high quality typesetting and one with tables) would be a better choice than the current status. BerlinSight (talk) 13:44, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

I think the problem here is that the systems are fundamentally different. HTML is made for flexible and dynamic layouting, adapting to any situation where it is asked to render and (these days) a lot of interactivity.

LaTeX is fundamentally designed for very reproducible and specific layouting in controlled circumstances, mostly for non-interactive situations. You can't make websites with LaTeX (it's hard to put jello into a straightjacket), and therefore you cannot print them with it either. And HTML cannot do what LaTeX can do.

BUT HTML is catching up. There are specs for adding print specific context (page size, pagebreak info, etc) to HTML for instance, but they are not yet supported. It's also a technology that is closer to what we are used to within our own ecosphere, making it easier to support for the engineers that have to do the incidental work to support it, and we have to duplicate less work in both stacks, since most of the time, the easy stuff will just work.

Neither is perfect, neither will be perfect, but one is sustainable for us, and the other is not. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 15:14, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Sorry, but it looks like you are missing the point completely. I did not ask to rewrite WP in LaTeX. The former PDF engine used LaTeX as a backend to create high quality PDFs, alas lacking tables. As the new engine has tables but an awful typographic and image quality and quite likely will never match the output quality of the old PDF engine, I would prefer to have the choice, which one to use (or better the old one with tables and single column layout, but that does not seem possible). BerlinSight (talk) 16:26, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

I was just talking about the technology stack:

• normal: wikicode -> html
• old engine: wikicode -> LaTeX -> PDF
• new engine: wikicode -> html -> PDF

We removed one very expensive translation step from the system, that had no maintainers and no experts available that were able to keep it online.

THAT is the only thing that matters. It's a resourcing decision. If you want to quit your existing job and for free improve the old system, then that's fine. —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 19:40, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

single columns latex layout including tables is possible with mediawiki2latex see http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ Dirk Hünniger (talk) 09:24, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

@Dirk Hünniger great work!

I am also disappointed by the typographic quality of the chromium rendering engine. Especially mathematical formulas look horrible ([2]). I did not know about mediawiki2latex, why don't we mention it as an alternative and let the user decide what they prefer? Debenben (talk) 13:19, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

I tested the claim that it can handle tables on the article schwarzschild-metric which was mentioned somewhere below:

mediawiki2latex -m -g -u https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild-Metrik -o "schwarzschild.pdf"

result: All tables are rendered perfectly. Mathematical formulas look perfect, only one drawback: some urls don't get any line-breaks, so they sometimes extend beyond the page margins Debenben (talk) 14:47, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Posting to bump cache, and hopefully fix missing comments. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 21:53, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Off-Topic: Why is this page PDF Functionality linked via wikidata to the English page of Compiler and all the versions in other languages?

I find this strange. Thanks for your attention! Roy17 (talk) 22:17, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Some kind of experiment: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q47506&diff=605073730&oldid=564953178

I reverted this. Thanks! wargo (talk) 22:33, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

Without links

Is it possible to disable links in generated PDF or to disable underlining? wargo (talk) 22:30, 23 February 2018 (UTC)

File Title

When Producing file title, please use initial cap. and no underscore. TQ 110.159.79.67 (talk) 01:38, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

شكرا لك على هذا الملف 196.91.130.66 (talk) 14:53, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Markdown?

This recent edit to the page suggests that there will be an option to export Wiki markdown instead of PDF. Is this correct? Steelpillow (talk) 17:16, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

If Wiki authors that want to create tailored Open Educational Resources especially generate from Wikiversity or Wikipedia can be very helpful as learning resource (see https://pandoc.org/try ) how the cross-compilation works. Client-side conversion based on wtf_wikipedia.js Bert Niehaus (talk) 08:15, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

So this appears to be about an alternative way for a client to import and convert raw wikitext from individual articles, that is wholly unrelated to the PDF export service and, as far as I can tell, from markdown as well. Steelpillow (talk) 09:43, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

It just shows an option to create the PDF on the client side due to problems of PDF generation on the server side. Of course this work around enables the export of even more formats. If that is not appropriate as recommendation in this discussion, excuse me for being off track. Bert Niehaus (talk) 13:01, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Gracias! Comprendido. Korriskoso-vnt (talk) 02:22, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Felicidades 2800:4B0:8002:974E:1:2:2DDD:8891 (talk) 23:11, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

With Wiki2Reveal there is a rapid prototype for converting the wiki markdown on the client side. See an example:

• Source Article in Wikiversity
• Same Source Article as RevealsJS presentation but converted on-the-fly on the client side by the browser with Wiki2Reveal. Bert Niehaus (talk) 05:35, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

If you want to create PDF on the client side, you can read the wiki markdown and start converting in the browser as runtime environment with existing libraries like https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF This reduces the load on the server, because just the wiki markdown and the embedded media must be transfered to the client. The server side implementation is available on wmlabs by Dirk Hünniger http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ that generates the PDF on the server and delivers the generated PDF to the user. Wiki markdown is converted in LaTeX (that can be done even in the browser) Costly in terms of performance is LaTeX conversion into the PDF. So why not allow the user to perform the final step - if he/she really wants to have a PDF document and the online-wikibook is not possible due to constraints of internet availability in remote areas and e.g. humantarian organisation want to create a tailored WikiBook for capacity building and need to deploy that offline (see tailored WikiBooks for Risk Mitigation) best regards and many thanks for discussing this topic and allowing offline use of Wikipedia and Wikiversity content under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. Bert Niehaus (talk) 05:54, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

No PDF Availiable

No PDF Availiable 138.246.2.199 (talk) 19:59, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

I had no trouble with the PDF download. It was complete and of good quality. 67.82.116.198 (talk) 20:49, 8 March 2018 (UTC)

Bonjour 10 3 2018 10h10

VIDIANI Fontaine les Dijon

j'ai aussi essayé car la page wiki telle quelle refuse de s'IMPRIMER 93.30.137.24 (talk) 09:11, 10 March 2018 (UTC)

When posting to this topic, please specify whether you mean no pdf for a single article or no pdf for a whole book. You should be able to download an individual article. You can not download a whole book at the moment because the software is disabled. This is expected. Please only post here if your experience differs. Steelpillow (talk) 11:59, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

I was very happy with creating single article PDF files.

After reading all your material about it, I don't understand why is that feature at least not available, regardless of what happens with book creation and what ever other changes you plan,.

Already millenniums ago some wise men wrote: "You don't kill the old king before you have a new one to replace him". 2602:306:CD89:B4E0:E0DE:FC17:EE64:F978 (talk) 05:36, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

It is available, though some issues are still being worked on. Steelpillow (talk) 05:43, 10 August 2018 (UTC)

Yes, single article PDFs work.

(And sometimes the king dies of ill health before you have a new one to replace him, to continue that analogy. Unfortunately.) Johan (WMF) (talk) 11:11, 10 August 2018 (UTC)