Dear Erik, Dear list,
Am 22.04.22 um 21:35 Uhr schrieb Erik Moeller:
That specific book is a good example of the problems that we've always had with PDF generation by way of LaTeX, such as complex tables. Also note the intermittent appearance of unsupported tags in the output.
As far as I know, the renderer they use is still partially proprietary. I'm not sure if it would still be seen as valuable to open source fully, given that LaTeX is indeed probably a technical dead-end for these kinds of conversions, and given that the codebase is very old.
You might like to know that there is a more recent free MediaWiki-to-LaTeX project that is actively maintained by Dirk Hünninger and can be tried out on WMF Labs:
https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/
I understand that Dirk produced some PDF versions for German Wikibooks, but I do not know whether he is still contributing.
I put Dirk in CC to let him know we speak of matters LaTeX. Maybe he would like to join the conversation.
Best regards, Jürgen.