This task tracks the Readers Web FY 2017-18 Q2 goal of
> Provide an expanded reading experience by improving the ways that users can download articles of interest for later consumption[.]
from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Audiences/2017-18_Q2_Goals#Readers.
= Summary
This goal tracks the continued provision of PDF functionality for the desktop and mobile websites. For this quarter, the goal would be to:
- Build and deploy a PDF renderer as a suitable replacement for Electron
- Determine and plan expanding the mobile PDF button functionality for browsers other than Chrome
- Determine the future of the books feature and collections extension
= Components
== Build and deploy a PDF renderer as a suitable replacement for Electron
During Q1, we completed most of planning and testing stages for replacing the Electron renderer with the Chromium rendering service for single article PDFs. During Q2 we will continue with building and deploying the service.
- {T181118}
- {T181084}
==Determine and plan expansion of mobile PDF button functionality for browsers other than Chrome
During Q1, a button was deployed to the mobile website that triggers the browser's print dialog. This was tracked in {T179914}. The button is currently limited to Chrome on Android. During QA, it was noted that triggering other browser's native (on Android) print dialog via JavaScript simply doesn't work. Notes on the various issues with these browsers are captured in {T179529}.
During this quarter, we would like to look into ways of expanding the button functionality to support all mobile browsers. This would be done through rendering the remaining PDFs (from non-Chrome browsers) via the new Chromium PDF renderer. We will begin with testing mobile PDFs with the new Chromium renderer.
Note: the remaining tasks for the extended button functionality are contingent on positive results based on initial performance testing ({T181513})
- {T163472}
== Determine the future of the books feature and collections extension
We would like to test the new PDF renderer's ability to process larger books. Based on this evaluation, we will make decisions on the future of the books feature and collections extension, tracked in ({T183161}). At this moment, we are not expecting any other development work on collections throughout the course of the quarter.