Talk:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality/2023
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About giving feedback
Update: (15 July 2019) We’ve launched the new PDF renderer. We’re looking at feedback, but haven't so far seen any significant issues. We might incorporate some suggestions, but want to note that this is not an ongoing project with continuous development. In other words, now that it's deployed and proven to work, the new renderer is entering maintenance mode. This page won’t be abandoned, but it could take a while before anyone reacts, simply because everyone's got so much else to do.
In terms of books, we've left it in the hands of volunteer developers and PediaPress. We'll be glad to reach out to them with questions, but we're not planning any involvement in terms of the technical implementation.
Status and plans
Obviously I have not used the Book Creator in a while, but I did find it very useful. I was getting ready to create a couple of books, only to find that this function has been removed. Is there any plan to allow book creation again in the future? And if not, why not? What is the problem to be solved? I understand that individual articles may be PDFed, but the Book Creator tool allowed much better organization. Thank you, --~ Gotanda (talk) 01:20, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
- It broke and was withdrawn. Attempts to replace it failed. A couple of those attempts remain available off-wiki. Depending on what you want, and especially if you are into tinkering with config files, you may get some mileage out of MediaWiki2LaTeX. For more of the history and some useful links, see wikipedia.en's page on Wikipedia:Books. Steelpillow (talk) 10:18, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks for that link to the summary. I tried reading through some of the lengthy Talk discussions about whether or not to disable the book creator. Quite a mess there and hard to follow. It is still unclear to me why Books were deprecated, but what is done is done. I tried using mediawiki2latex wmflabs org but it did not produce a readable book with the article contents in it. IIRC, one used to be able to export the books to epub a while back as well. Really is a shame. And, removing the entire Book space makes it much less likely that anyone will work on renewing the function. But, if you know of anyone who is actively working on it, I would do what I could to support that. Gotanda (talk) 23:34, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
- It works reasonably well for me. The Book Creator is still functional at en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Book&bookcmd=book_creator and I save the books out in my user space. Then enter the full https web url of the book page, and select the Template Expansion "Book / Collection". Select EPUB if you want, I have only used PDF and ODT (for post-conversion tidy up). The conversion can take a long time, so don't brew your coffee until you have clicked Start!
- If you are into Haskell, I am sure there are many improvements still to be made. 85.255.235.101 (talk) 02:58, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
- Sorry, that was me. whatever happened to the global auto-login. Steelpillow (talk) 02:59, 6 January 2023 (UTC)