Tentatively scheduling this task to Community-Relations-Support (Oct-Dec-2016), according to first conversations.

This task welcomes an owner...

Is T146387: Check PDF needed and appealing functionalities for communities related to this task (a subtask)?

@Qgil - yes, I think T146387: Check PDF needed and appealing functionalities for communities is a subtask

In the conversation, it would be useful to know whether after OCG is eliminated we can be given back our beloved mwlib for OpenDocument and ZIM output.

Is this task stalled or supposed to move to Community-Relations-Support (Jan-Mar 2017)

In general a summary why OCG was brought up, what worked well in OCG, what did not work well in OCG, why the idea Electron was brought up, how Electron will fix issues or not, would be very helpful.
I guess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Offline_Content_Generator#Offline_Content_Generator_.28OCG.29 could be a start for that (which I only found after quite some searching but maybe I missed some mailing list posts someone could point to?).

Relatedly, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/2162/ has no links to further information about "Electron".

@Moushira @ovasileva please edit the description in order to reflect a specific goal. What is the result expected to consider this task resolved successfully? What are the activities expected to achieve that result?

Also, as Andre says, a minimum background (could be simply links to more information) is welcome. The clearer we define the tasks for ourselves and whoever is interested, the more likely it is that we will be able to resolve them successfully. Thank you!

Hey @Qgil, I synced with @JKatzWMF yesterday. Need to update the page here https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/PDF_Rendering then we are ready to go.

@Moushira I just added this in an email, but need to document it here as well: This impacts many projects, not just wikipedia. Might be more important on wikibooks or wikivoyage, in fact. We will need to let those communities know about the consultation or even host a clone consultation there...

In T146757#2931109, @JKatzWMF wrote:

@Moushira I just added this in an email, but need to document it here as well: This impacts many projects, not just wikipedia. Might be more important on wikibooks or wikivoyage, in fact. We will need to let those communities know about the consultation or even host a clone consultation there...

+1. The most impacted communities are the wikibooks ones, as well as certain WP sub-projects (most notably the Medical WP community).

In T146757#2931198, @mobrovac wrote:

In T146757#2931109, @JKatzWMF wrote:

+1. The most impacted communities are the wikibooks ones

Uh? Why not Wikisource? But yes, definitely must consider non-Wikipedia projects (hence my question about the other formats, such as EPUB, ZIM and ODT: T146757#2864478 ).

IMO T143410 could be related or at least helpful.

I have only a small overview about the dynamics around the future of the OCG portable, so please correct me if I say something really wrong, but here are my toughs about it:

• Generating PDF based on HTML renderer seems indeed to be less adventurous than using Latex. But not sure, on a longer term this is a good move. Considering that OCG was a hack... maybe it would have made more sense to continue to improve the Latex based solution. So, no big opinion on this, I do not know how the paper specific challenges might be handled correctly by a good CSS/HTML renderer.

• I do not really like the concept of replacing OCG by Electron because of PDF. This backend should be output format agnostic. If we consider this backend to be mainly used by Wikipedia book creator or other dedicated solutions on Wikisource/Wikibooks, then PDF is probably not the most promising format: EPUB and ZIM are far more adapted.

To conclude, if we move in the direction to abandon Latex rendered PDF, I hope we will keep OCG agnostic part to allow later to plug (back) EPUB/ZIM exporter. This seems to me the most important thing.

Assigning this task to me because Moushira won't have time to finish it.

Update:

We're no longer sure we're simply moving to Electron, see T166188.

Conversation with users of the PDF function have been going on for a while now (banner up on the page where you create PDFs since a number of weeks):
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Reading/Web/PDF_Functionality

There's a summary here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/PDF_Functionality#Update_After_Consultation

We'll be broadcasting that a bit more when we have a backend decision.