Last modified: 2013-08-23 19:52:15 UTC

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Bug 474 - Allow exporting pages in printable document format (PDF)
Allow exporting pages in printable document format (PDF)
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
Export/Import (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Normal enhancement with 5 votes (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
:
: 3751 11623 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2004-09-13 11:42 UTC by Victor Farina
Modified: 2013-08-23 19:52 UTC (History)
7 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Victor Farina 2004-09-13 11:42:31 UTC
The include of a PDF button to all pages and articles, must be used by a single
user to print/download as pdf the entire article.
I think this is a must-be.
Comment 1 Brion Vibber 2004-09-13 14:55:59 UTC
Might be neat, but this is a low priority as browsers are already quite capable of printing articles and/or printing to a file.
Comment 2 Ricardo Tavares 2004-11-11 13:23:44 UTC
The pdf is a great idea for people doing academic research. Imagine the situation... I am doing 
a research on let´s say dogs. I could save the entire page to the hard disk and endup with a 
html page and a folder of filled with images that would include all that was on the article at 
that time. Or using a pdf generated file I could:

. Have all information on a self conteined unit
. Add the how to cite this (specific) article (MLA, Chicago etc.)
. Add the date of pdf criation (data capture) and date of last modification

and since academic places a great importance to (actually requires) credits add from the 
history page the authors of the article.

This could be actually a way to make wikipedia more cited in academic works but would probably 
atract academic writers to wikipedia !!

Try talking to a college profesor or a graduate student and you will get a better idea of the 
importance that is given to a pdf snap shoot of the article when combined with some more 
aditional information extracted at the time.
Comment 3 Brion Vibber 2004-11-11 19:16:22 UTC
File > Print... > Save to File

On most modern operating systems you should have the option to print to a PDF file already.
Comment 4 Damon Anderson 2004-12-17 05:21:09 UTC
With modern XML and XSLFO technology direct and controlled generation of PDF from page content would be far 
preferable than the print of page from a web browser. As to priority, I would see this as a major crowd 
pleaser. Certainly from a Wikipedia perspective there may be other priorities, I understand. But as a member 
of the mob of users out here I am subject to mob mentality and would ooze praises for such a function.
Comment 5 Rob Church 2005-10-09 16:33:41 UTC
What you really want is a means to generate a PDF document which contains:

* The article itself
* The date of the revision used
* A list of contributors to the article (as required by the GFDL)
* Information on how to cite the article
Comment 6 lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט 2005-10-20 11:00:49 UTC
*** Bug 3751 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 7 Samuel Benzaquen 2005-10-28 01:48:48 UTC
Web browser are not designed to print webpages, they are design to render them
on the screen in one (long and scrollable) page.
When you print a long webpage what you get is some poor rendered printed document.

We are trying to introduce Wikimedia as our primary document repository for our
company, but the inability do create well rendered print outs its halting the
project. 

A good PDF/PS/ODT export would create a nice printable document the way a Word
Processor does. I think that transforming the wiki document into latex and
compile it with a predefined latex template is not that hard and could yield
great results.
Comment 8 Felipe Corrêa da Silva Sanches 2005-12-02 03:21:38 UTC
this tool for generating pdf through latex already exists. It is called 
wiki2pdf. It is written in python and is not necessarily run on the same 
server as mediawiki. I was looking for this feature too when I discovered 
wiki2pdf. But their developers seem to have stopped supporting it.  I have 
made a patch to mediawiki 1.4.6 that puts this desired "Create a PDF" option 
on the UI using wiki2pdf as its backend. BUT the patch is completely buggy! 
And when I wrote it I was not aware of the extension mechanisms, so my poor 
patch modifies mediawiki core files. I am interested on rewriting it, but I am 
not sure when it will be done. In fact, I have too little knowledge yet to 
feel comfortable facing it. Some help for me on this topic would be great... 
Comment 9 Felipe Corrêa da Silva Sanches 2005-12-02 03:33:16 UTC
this is my ugly patch: 
http://aluno.no-ip.info/slivre/mediawiki-1.4.5+wikipdf.patch 
Just for reference, dont use it on a production wiki because it is BUGGY. 
Please... excuse-me... I WILL learn how to code extensions ASAP! 
 
And this is the wiki2pdf test-site: 
http://zappa.halden.net/~alex/wikipdf/ 
Comment 10 Felipe Corrêa da Silva Sanches 2005-12-04 22:50:25 UTC
I have just released the very first version of WikiPDF - a
Mediawiki Extension based on wiki2pdf

It is available at:
http://aluno.no-ip.info/slivre/wikipdf/wikipdf-mediawiki-extension-0.01.tar.bz2

It still has lots of references to wikipedia and a few bugs. It is the
same as my old patch but now it is coded as an extension, so it can
match a larger number of versions of mediawiki and it does not mess
with mediawiki core anymore.

You can test it on my personal wiki at http://aluno.no-ip.info/juca
Comment 11 Ramir 2006-06-19 04:20:24 UTC
Due to a bug “in their browsers” [1], about 99% of users have no way to save a local copy of a MediaWiki page with 
decent layout fidelity.

I have noticed that most users like to save local copies of pages, especially ones like long encyclopedic aritcles, 
manuals etc. It is therefore safe to argue that the ability to view the page in a standardised, portable format (such 
as PDF) is very demanded of MediaWiki’s user interface, and addition of such a feature would be a huge improvement.

Reference [1] — Brion Vibber, 2006-06-18, Bug#6350
Comment 12 JeLuF 2007-10-12 19:20:02 UTC
*** Bug 11623 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 13 Siebrand Mazeland 2008-08-18 18:47:26 UTC
Mass compoment change: <some> -> Export/Import
Comment 15 Mike.lifeguard 2009-01-04 02:31:40 UTC
(In reply to comment #14)
> Currently it seems as though the Collection extension will be the best bet to
> have this integrated into our production sites.
> 

Collections is now live on Wikibooks and Wikisource projects & I guess it will be going live on other projects soon as well. While it's not perfect rendering, I think it fills this void - marked as FIXED.
Comment 16 Dirk Hünniger 2013-08-23 19:52:15 UTC
There is good new if you want to create PDFs using LaTeX. On debian there is the mediawiki2latex package, which takes an URL to a wiki pages and write the pdf file generated with latex.

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