Talk:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality/2018/11

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.

Slow Download Response - Again/Still

Once again the pdf download function sometimes hangs, times out, or takes double-digit minutes to respond..

I have pointed this out (complained, really) several times and it is beyond me why you cannot fix this once and for all. Gazillions of websites have download-as-pdf and they work fine every time.

As I said in my last "complaint" you are not getting single penny from me at donation time unless this is fixed once and for all and that incredibly embarrassing months-old "We have technical problems with the function we use to create PDFs. We unfortunately have to replace it." message is gone because it is no longer needed. 68.98.170.156 (talk) 15:58, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia combines being one of the most visited websites in the world with being run without profit and refusing to sell ads. This is important, and we wouldn't be the same if it weren't true, but we never quite have the developer time and resources we'd like to have. There are more things that don't work as one would expect on one of the world's largest websites – it's more difficult to develop things for Wikipedia, because of the amount of traffic a function has to endure.

(Nothing is ever fixed once and for all. Entropy gets us all in the end. Code has to be fixed, then redone, as time passes.) Johan (WMF) (talk) 19:38, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Nevertheless, we hope these problems are caused by the current renderer, which we hopefully will replace in a couple of weeks. We'd be grateful if you could keep an eye out for that announcement and tell us if it hasn't fixed the problems for you.

Also, could you tell me what articles you've been trying to make PDFs out of?

And what type connection you've been using to access the internet? Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:42, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Progress?

It is now nearly three months since the last update and test document. Would it be possible for PediaPress to give us a progress report? Steelpillow (talk) 21:52, 11 November 2018 (UTC)

PediaPress has been working on some LaTeX stuff lately. @Ckepper, is there anything else to report? Johan (WMF) (talk) 19:15, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

As Johan reported, I have been quite busy with other stuff (like paid work). The last thing I worked on was LaTeX support (See Maxwell's Equations and Schrödinger equation). This had some detrimental effects on image scaling - see pages 11 and 15 in the Schrödinger article - that I have not yet been able to fix. Moreover, it seems like some formulas are not rendered correctly at all: check out the Formulation in SI units convention for an example - the scaling of the formula seems completely broken and I am lacking the LaTeX skills to fix this. This could be a problem wit my local LaTeX distribution, or local settings or within the LaTeX formula itself. Any insight into how this could be fixed would be highly appreciated.

The last big piece that I haven't touched at all are tables. With the original PediaPress renderer, this was the most complex part but maybe we can start small and expand the feature-set. I would rather focus on setting up a basic render server so people can start using it. Ckepper (talk) 20:54, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

@Ckepper why work on Latex support when there's already an excellent software for that ? http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ 125.253.56.226 (talk) 11:50, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

PediaPress created a LaTeX renderer 10 years ago that is still in use today. The biggest challenge we faced with rendering Wikipedia was the heterogeneity of the content. Most editors stop working on an article when it looks as intended in their browser. Semantic or "clean" markup are not of particular interest. You can fix this for a small number of pages (or extensions) but it becomes unsurmountable when you want to address all of Wikipedia.

We decided to use a HTML / CSS Paged Media based renderer because this approach creates the least amount of friction between on-screen and print content for the majority of the pages. Other projects and more qualified engineers might find better solutions but I will continue on the current path. Ckepper (talk) 14:45, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Another problem is that mediawiki2latex is written in a language called haskell, which not many programmers know. It would be difficult to ensure flexible support options in the future, which is the very problem which brought us to today's sorry state. Steelpillow (talk) 16:39, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

Hi,

I am the developer of mediawiki2latex. I currently work on a paid project for the German government, so my time is quite limited. It is even hard for me to take part in my Aikido classes.

I will try to keep the mediawiki2latex website up and running as well as maintain the mediawiki2latex Debian package for as long as I can. But I currently don't have any time to add new features and it is unlikely that I every will. A similar project also written in Haskell is called pandoc. Its very actively developed. But still I think you currently do get better results with mediawiki2latex.

I also recommend to learn Haskell. Probably you will not use it at work, but the skills you learn by doing Haskell are very helpful in day to day work as software developer or scientist. It a bit like studying maths at university. You will never need to work with these abstract objects as such, but the skills to solve problems in abstract manner are really handy.

Yours Dirk Dirk Hünniger (talk) 22:02, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

Finally, I found some time to continue working on the renderer. Math formulas have been improved as well as tables. In the next few days (hopefully before christmas) we (PediaPress) plan to launch a test server that should allow you to generate PDFs of arbitrary articles. Until then, checkout those examples: 10 Random, Amphibious Aircrafts, Chemical Element, Maxwell Equations, Premier League, Schrödinger Equation Ckepper (talk) 22:10, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Thank you, this is showing real progress. Steelpillow (talk) 07:57, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

What's the hold up?

The PDF links seem to be completely broken. Every attempt I've made at downloading a PDF has only caused the page to hang indefinitely.

It's extremely crucial that someone find a way to resolve this issue. Wikisource is a lone beacon of hope for people who need access to public domain literature, as search engines are becoming increasingly congested with links to malicious sites that won't surrender downloads unless you're willing to allow your computer to be infected with spyware. 75.63.209.97 (talk) 17:46, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

We haven't seen this on our side, but are investigating. Thank you for reporting. Johan (WMF) (talk) 19:11, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Could you tell me what articles you've been trying to make a PDF out of? Johan (WMF) (talk) 15:43, 14 November 2018 (UTC)

unicode of futhark runes not displaying

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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I noticed when downloading a pdf of the "Elder Futhark" page that when the runes are in Unicode they don't display at all. They appear as blank boxes instead. 114.77.118.8 (talk) 02:30, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Noted. Thank you for reporting, it's much appreciated. Johan (WMF) (talk) 12:34, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

mediawiki2latex can handle the article inculding the runes Dirk Hünniger (talk) 09:37, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

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

some good to make pdf

Hi i got an idea to make pdf easily use javascript rather then php server side

using js to make pdf is great idea because ther isnt load in server (i am programmer i know. to make file in server side you have to save it then dump it)

but in js you can make in object then runder the file

so take a look to the URL[1]

goodbay.

[1] 85.194.79.90 (talk) 08:32, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

The codebase is too big to download and run in a web browser. It is probably bigger than most books. Creating a whole book could cripple the user device for an hour or more. Steelpillow (talk) 19:22, 23 December 2018 (UTC)

Wrong page is converted to PDF

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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I tried to convert the "network analyzer (electrical)" English Wikipedia page to PDF. The resulting PDF is written in German and is about "Aloisius von Gonzaga". 151.100.135.42 (talk) 12:57, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

Uh. That sounds really strange. Thank you for reporting. Do you speak German, so that is in any way possible that you could have visited the Aloisius von Gonzaga article? Johan (WMF) (talk) 13:33, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

I just saw this post so I downloaded a PDF from the same page. It came through as the correct one. Steelpillow (talk) 14:16, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

Marking as resolved, we have switched to a different rendering service. Tgr (WMF) (talk) 10:37, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

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

Ihr sammelt Spenden in Millionenhöhe und bekommt kein pdf-Dokument erzeugt?

Hätte ich das früher gewusst, hätte es keine Spende von mir gegeben.

Die Buchfunktion funktioniert auch nicht.

Schreiben tun unsereins kostenlos.

Was passiert eigentlich mit dem Geld? 79.254.74.75 (talk) 20:39, 24 November 2018 (UTC)

Hier kann man lesen, was mit dem Geld passiert:

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ Johan (WMF) (talk) 20:59, 24 November 2018 (UTC)

Die Spenden finanzieren z.B. diesen Server mit dem man in der Tat an ein pdf kommen kann.

http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ Dirk Hünniger (talk) 21:02, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

When I convert the PDF to word the formulas are a mess

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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In fact, in the past it was easy to select Wikipedia texts with formulas and paste ot directly on a word document. Nowadays the formulas has got to be printed and pasted one by one to a word document. That's awfull because makes me waste a lot of time printing them one by one to build a word document in which I can write my descriptions of the demonstrations. 200.192.219.162 (talk) 19:30, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Noted. Thank you for reporting. Johan (WMF) (talk) 20:39, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

In http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/ you can choose "odt" in "Output Format" combo box an import the result in your favourite word processor. Dirk Hünniger (talk) 06:58, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

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