Topic on Talk:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality/Flow

1. Images should be excluded from the PDF version. We add a few (sometimes quite a few) images, because they help us to make destinations more attractive. That's not needed in the printed version, which is mostly used during traveling, where one cares about the space and needs as few printed pages as possible. The ideal solution would be excluding images by default with the possibility of adding an exception when the image is required during travel (e.g., a subway map). For those 'important' images, it should be possible to customize their size. For example, a 5x5 cm version of the subway map is OK in the online article (one can always click on it and zoom in), but useless in the printed version. It should be expanded to the whole page.
2. Page margins in the current PDF version are way too large. Page space is used inefficiently.
3. Large part of Wikivoyage content is based on Template:Listing and its derivatives, which put together information on each object of tourist interest (sights, hotels, train stations, etc.) Rendering of such content is far from ideal. In particular, the objects are numbered automatically in the online version, and the numbers correspond to map markers. However, PDF simply renders all numbers to 1, and printed version can not be used together with the map.
4. Ideally, it should be possible to generate printed versions of maps and include them into the PDF file. Each Wikivoyage article already specifies through Template:Geo map center and sometimes the zoom level. The rest is perhaps a matter of integrating PDF version with the Extension:Kartographer that generates our maps. --~~~~

With respect to images, I believe it would, in general, be more natural to include images by default and exclude specific ones through e.g. the use of a template, in a similar way to how meta-templates are left out of PDFs generated with the old system. (That doesn't, in principle, exclude the behaviour you describe being made available through e.g. per-wiki configuration.)

We may need a special discussion on that, but I am pretty sure that at least the community of Russian Wikivoyage considers using more images in the online version and excluding them in the printed one. Therefore, it will be much easier to include 3% of images than exclude 97%.

That isn't going to work as a default. The Wikisources in reproducing books would wish to have the book shown as originally produced. If there are images then show them.

I think we are discussing defaults for Wikivoyage here. Other projects may, of course, follow a completely different approach.

So maybe the discussion is that you believe that there needs to be configuration (per wiki, or per user) around whether images need to be printed. At this point in time I am not certain that such configuration exists for a wiki or for a user, and if it doesn't exist there are no defaults.

A travel guide without images? Surely you jest. Images are essential to creating print travel guides that are competitive with commercial products.

We are not talking about the commercial product. The "commercial product" is on wiki, and it may have as many images as one likes. Printed version has a different usage concept. It is needed only in special situations (in a more general traveling situation, offline version saved in the smartphone via Kiwix will suffice), and in these situations printing and carrying less paper becomes crucial.

That is not true. One of Wikivoyage's explicit design goals is to produce good, attractive, and competitive printed guides.

It could be a meaningful goal 10 years ago, but nowadays it is simply obsolete and unrealistic.

If you feel that's the case, you should take it up with the Wikivoyage community. At the moment, it remains an explicit design goal.

Related to this discussion, the ability to HideInPrint or NoPrint a section of text, programming code (tagged code), or included file should continue to be supported.

To me, the most obvious approach to reduce confusion for end users is to print images by default, and hide them with some type of appropriate tagging. Using a bot, it's easy to tag and exclude as many images as necessary if that's what a particular community desires.

User:Dave Braunschweig, do you think that adding 10-20 templates on each(!) page is a viable solution?

If each page needs 10-20 different things applied to it, then yes, adding 10-20 templates on each page is a viable solution. Technically this isn't a problem. Templates may include other templates, and a bot can update 10,000 pages a day, making short work of almost any editing requirements.

But the more important perspective is user experience rather than editor experience. In the context of this discussion, that means designing PDF functionality so that it works by default as users expect it to, and then adding any necessary features to accommodate editor concerns. Users are overwhelmingly going to expect that what they see on the page is what appears in the PDF. There should be a way to customize that, but the default needs to support user expectations.

@Atsirlin do note that the plan for the future to move to template styles that sit separately, so that may change the issue/problem as you see it. It seems that the ability to hide/show images as an option for the user printing is something that should be available.

I'd be very surprised if I would not get the images if I generated a wikivoyage PDF

Why do you need them exactly? Have you ever tried to print a long travel guide like [[voy:en:Boston/Downtown]] or [[:voy:en:Bangkok/Rattanakosin]]? Will you spend extra pages and ink (or even money) on printing some fancy images, which you don't really need during your travel? Would you like to download a 5 Mb PDF file instead of a 100 Kb one when a slow internet connection in the middle of nowhere? These are all very practical issues.

Telling people how they should use a resource seems counter-productive to me. Listening to how people utilise our resources and making it available to the broadest possible audience seems like a good course to follow, than solely follow your own narrower needs.

I do communicate with Wikivoyage readers and editors, I know their needs, and I convey those needs here. I do not think the opinion of non-Wikivoyagers is relevant here.

FWIW please do not remove images! I print to pdf and view on my phone. Printing to paper is a thing of the past and IMO wikivoyage doesn't have enough of them :)

@ Jdlrobson, do you mean that we should forget about proper offline version and use pdf's instead?