:[ Please help recheck the old bugs listed at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/BugTriage-mwlib, mostly filed by Wikisource/Wikibooks users.

Nemo

-------- Messaggio inoltrato -------- Oggetto: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Changes to PDF export; ZIM/EPUB will be disabled soon Data: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 19:01:38 -0700 Mittente: Erik Moeller Rispondi-a: Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects

Hi folks,

A change from our legacy PDF export infrastructure to a more maintainable system has been a long time coming. Thanks to the work of C. Scott Ananian, Matt Walker, Max Semenik, Brad Jorsch, and the Parsoid/Services teams, we're close to disabling the old PDF rendering and enabling the new as default.

The old "mwlib" (Reportlab-based) PDF service will be disabled on September 29 [1], and the new "ocg" (Parsoid/XeLaTex-based) PDF service will be enabled on the same date. The output looks very different (two column LaTeX-generated output) and there are a few more customization options, as well (visible when you use the "Create a book" feature). This renderer has much improved rendering of non-latin scripts and fixes many issues of the old PDF service.

There are still a number of bugs to work through, as well, which we will do as a low priority. Most noticeably, tables are a mess - and since we have such a large variety of them, that's a pretty long tail. This is not a high priority project for us. We're looking for co-maintainers, and we have some ideas how to improve the architecture to make it easy for the community to optimize for different outputs -- if you're interested in joining the development effort, let us know via the new services list ( https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/services ), wikitech-l or on #mediawiki-services on irc.freenode.net.

Please report any bugs against the "OCG" product in Bugzilla. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=OCG

If you want to more quickly test prior to deployment, you can add this one-liner to your common.js/global.js, which will point the "Download as PDF" link in the sidebar to the new renderer:

$('#coll-download-as-rl a').each(function() { this.href = this.href.replace(/([&?]writer=)rl(&|$)/g, "$1rdf2latex$2") });

As part of this change, we will disable ZIM and EPUB export for the time being. If you're interested in working on ZIM or EPUB support for the new offline content generator, or other export formats, please let us know via the above channels.

Thanks, Erik

[1] See https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments for the planned deployment window