Survey: 2015
Orignal Wishes:
This card tracks a proposal from the 2015 German Community Wishlist: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Umfragen/Technische_W%C3%BCnsche_2015/PDF_und_Drucken#Tabellen_in_PDFs
It received 22 support votes and was ranked #11: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Umfragen/Technische_W%C3%BCnsche_2015/Topw%C%BCnsche#Anzeige_eines_Hinweises.2C_dass_Tabellen_in_PDFs_nicht_.28fehlerfrei.29_dargestellt_werden_.5BUmfrage_2015.5D
This was also in the international Community Wishlist Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey
There it received 23 support votes, and was ranked #39 out of 107 proposals. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey/Templates#Inserting_templates_.28tables.29_in_PDF_and_Books
Problem: When downloading an article as pdf or as a book in pdf form, tables of any kind seem to be omitted.
Example: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob-Weltmeisterschaft_2016
Communities that might be interested:
- https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Skriptorium (see eg. https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Beschreibung_des_Oberamts_Blaubeuren/Tabellen)
- https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Flexion:lesen
Scoping by the TCB-team:
After having checked back with the community, we now plan to do the following:
- T135613: [GTWL] Include hint about excluded tables when generating a PDF for the time until we actually have a solution to offer
- T142201: Create a mediawiki extension for browser-based rendered pdf support so that "Download as pdf" allows a browser-based rendered pdf version
- The WMF's Services team will set up a server for the electron service: T142226: Productize the Electron PDF render service & create a REST API end point
- T142207: Investigate which styling quick fixes could be made to the print style to see if we can improve styling at least a little bit
Research insights:
- As of August 2016, about 10 pdfs are created per second [1]
- There seem to be far more requests for single page PDFs than article collections: https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/collection_use (thanks @GWicke)
Related tickets:
A general ticket for open issues around tables in pdfs can be found here: T73808: Support tables in PDF rendering (tracking)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#Wikipedia.2C_we_have_a_problem see section above, CScott's comment