Hey offliners,
In case you're interested, the Foundation will be working to replace OCG over the coming months. I wanted to make sure you're aware in case you rely on any of this infrastructure and/or have plans for further development dependent on it.
What this means in the short term is that PDF book rendering (through Book Creator) will be shut off for a few months at least while a suitable replacement is researched, tested, and built.
Here's the full write up: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/PDF_Functionality
Let me know if you have any questions or if this has major impact to your work.
Cheers, Anne
Anne Gomez, 11/10/2017 02:12:
In case you're interested, the Foundation will be working to replace OCG over the coming months. I wanted to make sure you're aware in case you rely on any of this infrastructure and/or have plans for further development dependent on it.
What this means in the short term is that PDF book rendering (through Book Creator) will be shut off for a few months at least while a suitable replacement is researched, tested, and built.
Here's the full write up: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/PDF_Functionality
Let me know if you have any questions or if this has major impact to your work.
It does, of course. Wikisource and Wikibooks users sorely need to print books for offline reading, it's something we keep hearing from anybody in "real life".
Removing basic functionality and downgrading existing features for no gain is an excellent long-run method to kill projects like Wikibooks, Wikisource and Wikiversity whose potential users (such as teachers and other OER folks) may prefer alternative platforms which show more care.
Nemo
I still have trouble understanding what's the point of making functionality worse for a majority of users, or indeed all of them.
I've just tried exporting single pages with the "download PDF" link (the metadata says they're made by "Chromium") and they're completely unreadable, with overlapping characters and so on. They're considerably worse even than the PDF produced by a stock browser from the printable version (Firefox 56 here).
Even if the previous functionality happened to error out 95 % of the time, it would be better than the present situation.
Federico
Federico Leva (Nemo), 11/10/2017 09:40:
It does, of course. Wikisource and Wikibooks users sorely need to print books for offline reading, it's something we keep hearing from anybody in "real life".
Removing basic functionality and downgrading existing features for no gain is an excellent long-run method to kill projects like Wikibooks, Wikisource and Wikiversity whose potential users (such as teachers and other OER folks) may prefer alternative platforms which show more care.
Hi Nemo,
Thanks for voicing your concern. The issue you raise, is a known issue being tracked and worked on here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T178665
It might be also related to chromium https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=431507
We have a possible fix of implementing a different font stack tracked here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T169828 In the meantime, I would use the browser's built in print function and print-to-pdf.
Thanks,
J
On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 2:13 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
I still have trouble understanding what's the point of making functionality worse for a majority of users, or indeed all of them.
I've just tried exporting single pages with the "download PDF" link (the metadata says they're made by "Chromium") and they're completely unreadable, with overlapping characters and so on. They're considerably worse even than the PDF produced by a stock browser from the printable version (Firefox 56 here).
Even if the previous functionality happened to error out 95 % of the time, it would be better than the present situation.
Federico
Federico Leva (Nemo), 11/10/2017 09:40:
It does, of course. Wikisource and Wikibooks users sorely need to print
books for offline reading, it's something we keep hearing from anybody in "real life".
Removing basic functionality and downgrading existing features for no gain is an excellent long-run method to kill projects like Wikibooks, Wikisource and Wikiversity whose potential users (such as teachers and other OER folks) may prefer alternative platforms which show more care.
Offline-l mailing list Offline-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l
Jon Katz, 22/11/2017 03:29:
The issue you raise, is a known issue being tracked and worked on here
The issue I raise is that you should not make a change that makes life worse for all users. The feature is currently useless in 100 % of cases, so you should have rolled back immediately to the previous system as long as it works even in 0,1 % of the cases.
For now, I'm telling people to use the PediaPress book builder and ignore the PDFs produced by Wikimedia Foundation. This is not sustainable.
Federico