[Wikimediaindia-l] PDF rendering of Indian language wiki pages

[Shiju Alex]

Since the tool is under the early stages of development, I know it is not
good to expect a perfect PDF.

Some general comments are:

   - For Malayalam, eventhough the text rendering is almost perfect, I could
   find there are some unwnated space inserted with in few words. I assume it
   is due to the *justification alignment* used. In general I feel it is
   better to keep left align text for the paragraphs. May be we can add this an
   option in PDF generation tool.
   - By default, it is better to place images inline with the text. May be
   an additional option to remove images from rendered PDF or place images
   below the corresponding paragraph can be added in the tool.
   - The first page of the PDF need to be have some information. May be the
   introduction paragraph can be included in the first page. It is not good to
   keep it blank.
   - The refernces/href links and so on need to be handled in better way.

Since the tool is still under under development I am not going for in depth
analysis.
\
Shiju





On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 10:36 PM, Santhosh Thottingal <
santhosh.thottingal at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> We are working on a Complex script PDF rendering library named
> PyPDFLib(https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pypdflib/). One of its
> test case (or use case) is to render a wiki page in complex script(any
> Indian Language) to PDF. Currently PDF export feature is not
> available(not working) for Indian language wiki projects because of
> technical incapability of Python Reportlab library.
>
> Just wanted to give an early preview of this software library through
> an online interface : http://silpa.smc.org.in/Render
> You can try with a Wikipedia page in your language and verify the generated
> PDF.
> You can also access this using this URL
> http://silpa.smc.org.in/Render?wiki=http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/இலங்கை
> (replace that wiki URL with other page addresses too - any Ianguage -
> not limited to Indian languages)
>
> There are lot of items not implemented, but your feedback is requested
> on the current version.
> The library uses Pango for text rendering and Cairo for graphics and
> PDF features.
>
> ps: Don't get surprised if you get a 500 Error page for the random
> page you are trying. Just try another wiki page ;)
>
> Thanks
> Santhosh Thottingal
> http://thottingal.in
>
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> Wikimediaindia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
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>
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