Talk:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality/2018/06

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.

Pdf download works perfectly

I don't know why Wikipedia keeps saying that "we are having technical problems". I managed to download many pages on Pdf without any problem. Thank you! 196.61.33.53 (talk) 17:47, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Though the download works perfectly, the quality of the PDFs still isn't even acceptable. SCNR 89.204.139.174 (talk) 15:23, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

It's good, but looks like it can use some work... for example... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols_by_subject

Page breaks aren't consistent with section and subsection headers. 205.234.249.242 (talk) 18:42, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

pdf files in good quality can be created with http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ Dirk Hünniger (talk) 20:45, 8 June 2018 (UTC)

autodownloading

The page I was reading I needed translated into English, which worked well until I went to download it. Because of the way you have it set up, it didn't download it in English, it downloaded the original page in German. That is no help whatsoever. 2601:248:527F:1B40:55B7:8051:4527:D98A (talk) 04:37, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

Hello everyone,

empty pages in printout. Page 1 with text, page 2 empty, page 3 few text, etc.

Regards,

Frank 79.236.79.170 (talk) 06:47, 11 June 2018 (UTC)

You mean that you used a machine translation function in your browser? I'm afraid it'll continue to be the case that you can only download PDFs in the language of the page, as the function gets its information from our article as it looks on our server and not any changes you've made to it on your computer. Johan (WMF) (talk) 10:37, 12 June 2018 (UTC)

Bad formatting of text in PDF output

The PDF output for the w:en:Glossary of Sudoku page is badly formatted in a few ways:

• There are several instances of overlapping text in the whole article and they are more pronounced in the 'Other terminology' section.
• There are instances of 'Spaces between words missing (visually)' issue in some places e.g. there should be a space between 'givens' and 'for' in the definition for 'Minimum number of clues' in the 'Other terminology' section. I say (visually) because copying and pasting the text in a text editor does reveal the space between the two words.
• In the 'Notes' section the text is linkified when the are links but the URL is also displayed which seems to be redundant and spoiling the readability of the text. It might be better to avoid the showing URL when the text is linkified.

This seems to be happening when the links are created using the {{cite web}} template. Kaartic ^[talk] 19:05, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

The first two are the same issue and is tracked as phab:T178665. The latter is intentional, as usually in print you dont have links, and since they are so critical for the sourcing, they are always added in the print version. Since there is no special CSS PDF medium and also because many of the pdfs are actually used later on for printing, its probable that the links in the referencing will remain this way for the foreseeable future —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 19:56, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

Thanks. Regarding the links, in that case why aren't the URLs of the links created using [URL label] revealed but just linkified? Kaartic ^[talk] 20:30, 13 June 2018 (UTC)

The link is added by using [ link link ] and it's rendered correctly. The best/easiest way is to edit the page and change the link name.

There is an unconditional rule in the CSS (https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/resources/src/mediawiki.legacy/commonPrint.css#L69). Each time the browser renders a link in print view - it adds (href) after it. There is no way to do the conditional checking for link content in CSS, because of that we cannot check if link href and content are identical. This would require an additional parsing (or JS processing before we print the document). PMiazga (WMF) (talk) 12:10, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

I wasn't referring of the links added using [link link] in the "Notes" section. I was referring to the "MAA Math Games – Sudoku Variations" link in the References section of the "Glossary of Sudoku" article. It's actually created using [URL label] but the style you point to doesn't seem to applied to it while it should have been. (BTW, thanks for the link) Kaartic ^[talk] 14:42, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

All external links will have label and the url. That's how the desktop print worked for pretty long time. The new print mode (for mobile, please try to print article using mobile site) will no display the URLs as those PDFs are designed to be read on mobile devices. The desktop PDF mode (using vector skin) is used both for reading on computer (where you can click a link) and for printing (where we need to show full URL if user wants to visit that website). PMiazga (WMF) (talk) 15:40, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

OK, didn't expect there was confusion about which printing I was referring to. Sorry about that. I was stating the issues I was facing with the PDF generated using the "Download as PDF" feature in desktop. I was elaborating on that as I found that behaviour odd. I guess it's time to speak with some screen shots.

I initially downloaded the PDF version of the "Glossary of Sudoku" using the "Download as PDF" feature. I noticed that the links in the "Notes" section of the PDF were both linkified and the corresponding URLs were also shown (which has been reasoned, fine). I also noticed that a link in the "References" section(the "MAA Math Games – Sudoku Variations" link) of the same article were styled differently — linkified but URLs not shown. I find this odd because of the inconsistency in styling links in two sections. Kaartic ^[talk] 18:14, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

I like the one-column style of the "Generate PDF" function.

I like the one-column style of the "Generate PDF" function. If possible, please add a radio button to switch between one/two columns and with/without table of contents. But I prefer to have the one column, without toc setting as the default behaviour. 87.78.159.31 (talk) 09:02, 19 June 2018 (UTC)

Does not save in traditional Chinese

I select traditional chinese whilst reading the article, but I am unable to convert the page into traditional when exporting via pdf 1.173.25.60 (talk) 13:36, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

This is issue phab:T167603 —TheDJ (Not WMF) (talk • contribs) 11:05, 28 June 2018 (UTC)