Talk:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality/2018/05

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.

Update: (23 April 2018) PediaPress will take over the development of the books-to-PDF functionality. See Reading/Web/PDF Functionality for more information.

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.

Is there any clue on deployment time?

Hello! I have been this course telling professors that they could download what their students did in a book format -"but not yet, soon"-... so I would like to know if there is any time scheduled for this feature. Thanks! Theklan (talk) 10:49, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

PediaPress is investigating. We thought that December was realistic, but now it's May because plan A didn't work (as sometimes happen in software development), so ... we'll let you know as soon as possible. Johan (WMF) (talk) 11:13, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

you can already download wiki data in various book and ebook format with mediawiki2latex

http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ Dirk Hünniger (talk) 14:12, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Indeed, I can download individual articles. But this MediaWiki2Latex doesn't download bunch of articles as books, isn't it? Theklan (talk) 14:48, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

You can also use it with collections. The command line option --bookmode or -k is handy in this case. But you will have to install ubuntu and the mediawiki2latex package on your computer. Theoretically you could select Template expansion = "Bookmode" in the web interface. But the computational resources on the underlying server are not large enough to handle collections of more the a few articles. The command line version in the ubuntu package repository does not have such limitations. Dirk Hünniger (talk) 17:10, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Can I download that in Word form?

I have try to download a article on the Chinese Wikipedia. It was not so clear, could you make it clearer?

Can I download in Word Form, that'll be more easier. Thank you so much! Wikipedia is the best search engine I've ever seen! Linear D (talk) 02:12, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

with http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ you can download odt files, which you can import into your favorite word processor Dirk Hünniger (talk) 14:28, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Your articles are so good! Awesome! Keep the good work!

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.

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Congratulations! Linear D (talk) 02:22, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

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

Don't underline links

Too much underlines reduce the readability of the pdf, and they're useless.

I use PDF rendering either for printing or offline use. In either case I don't need the links, in most cases the links are not useful and don't need to be emphasize. By removing the link emphasisis you will get a cleaner and more readable output.

PS : Great work Vanyar (talk) 09:16, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

in http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ you can download pdf files, in which links are not underlined Dirk Hünniger (talk) 14:29, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

I need the book processor very soon. i will write a crime book and need many self created lexica

i will write a crime book and need many self created lexica, so i need the html-to-pdf function latetst end may 2018 2A02:908:8A1:BAA0:54B5:477E:AC9:70E3 (talk) 18:38, 20 May 2018 (UTC)

That's unlikely to happen, unfortunately. Our apologies. Johan (WMF) (talk) 09:31, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

you could use http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ Dirk Hünniger (talk) 09:47, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

change the system

Since a very, very long time we see Wiki's warning about the still unsolved problems with pdf's. Regardless the fact I've had never problems with these docouments created by Wiki, this problems seem to keep on for a very, very long time. In situations like this, it is better to crush the old system (because you give it a try over years), and to set up an absolutely new pdf-creator. Be happy with it! Archimedic (talk) 19:00, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

We're actually doing exactly that. Johan (WMF) (talk) 22:25, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Sorry No, you don't. What was meant here obviously is to crush the newer old system which solved one issue creating equally bad new problems. Alas, that's not going to improve the situation in the short run. I'd rather recommend just giving the user the choice between the current ugly typographic and image quality with tables and the older high quality output without tables. I.e. reactivate the old PDF export extension and the option to use either that or Electron, just like it was when Electron was introduced. Then WM should in fact look for a brand new solution - but don't press it. 89.204.139.173 (talk) 09:45, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

The original system is not an option any more. The hosting hardware has gone, the software is no longer supportable. It is not worth obtaining old-style hardware from somewhere and commissioning it just as a temporary measure, even if the software were supportable. Steelpillow (talk) 19:36, 7 July 2018 (UTC)