Better PDF rendering from browsers themselves by their print functionality (with CSS3’s Paged Media Module[1]) could be another method. There’s often less friction when using features integrated in the browser, and with the much better general rendering and support through HTML engines over other projects like LaTeX (no matter how much I use it myself).
Sadly there doesn’t seem to be much currently done in this track, at least in Chromium[2].
[1]: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-gcpm-3/ https://www.w3.org/TR/css-gcpm-3/ [2]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=368053 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=368053
Étienne
Le 22 avr. 2022 à 16:35, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com a écrit :
For those who haven't tried it out, here's what the PediaPress output looks like (after it's done compiling the book, it'll give you a preview): https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Book&bookcmd=order_co...
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.
If you're mainly using English Wikipedia, you might be under the mistaken impression that the book creator is hidden from view. But it is in fact still linked from the sidebar of many of the largest Wikipedias, including French, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. A link on every page - that's quite a bit of exposure!
I agree it's a fair question what should happen to it: removal, replacement, or repair. In general, I do think there's a strategic case to be made for a more user-friendly way to create custom collections and share/export them in multiple formats (and to point people towards Kiwix and the ZIM format, which are indeed awesome for educational and offline use cases), and it'd be great to see direct collaborations with the OpenZIM/Kiwix community on this as Emmanuel suggests.
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