Current Status: Currently, no tables of any sort are included when you print a wikipedia article as pdf. However, @cscott has started writing a patch to change that: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/107587/. The patch adds tables to pdfs, but does not cover all cases possible.
Task: Improve the patch, e.g. by:
- handling COLSPAN and ROWSPAN attributes
- handling cell alignment
- handling tables that are longer than a single page
Please be aware that there are separate tasks for adding all tables in an appendix of the pdf.
Background:
The proposal to Include tables in pdfs received 23 support votes in the community wishlist survey, 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
This was also on the German Community Wishlist 2015: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Umfragen/Technische_W%C3%BCnsche_2015/PDF_und_Drucken#Tabellen_in_PDFs