Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] New PDF Render decommissioned on 1st January 2020?
And fwiw afaik pediapress hasn't *really* supported mwlib for years now. The commit history at https://github.com/pediapress/mwlib/commits/master is pretty sparse. --scott, who wrote the ocg renderer On Sun, Mar 17, 2019, 5:00 PM Tisza Gergő wrote: > On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 1:40 PM Alex Monk wrote: > >> I could be misremembering but wasn't that the thing that nobody knew how >> to reproduce the setup of and was one of the last things left in pmtpa? >> > > Yeah, and also on Ubuntu Hardy (which was EOL for over a year by then). > ___ > Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list > Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors > ___ Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] New PDF Render decommissioned on 1st January 2020?
On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 1:40 PM Alex Monk wrote: > I could be misremembering but wasn't that the thing that nobody knew how > to reproduce the setup of and was one of the last things left in pmtpa? > Yeah, and also on Ubuntu Hardy (which was EOL for over a year by then). ___ Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] New PDF Render decommissioned on 1st January 2020?
On Sun, 17 Mar 2019 at 20:28, Tisza Gergő wrote: > I think the WMF ran its own mwlib service a long time ago (2013-ish?) but > it didn't work well > I could be misremembering but wasn't that the thing that nobody knew how to reproduce the setup of and was one of the last things left in pmtpa? ___ Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] New PDF Render decommissioned on 1st January 2020?
On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 12:50 PM Dirk Hünniger wrote: > A Chromium based solution is certainly one > of the best you can get. Its cheap in computational resources and > updates should be available for a long time. I think computationally it's actually more expensive (OCG transformed the wikitext syntax tree into TeX, while Chromium does full HTML layouting). That's one of the reasons PDF rendering for collections is not avaible anymore; Chromium would just crash when trying to render a thousand-page book. On the other hand, Chromium-rendered PDF will actually look the way it looks in the browser, without any maintenance effort needed (other than occasional tweaks to the print CSS), while with non-browser-based tools every template, extension and wikitext feature that had a visual component required dedicated handling, and common layout concepts like tables or multiple columns were extremely hard to get right. > I just figured out from the following link > that the new renderer was based on mwlib and reportlab. Neither of those are mentioned on the page though. I think the WMF ran its own mwlib service a long time ago (2013-ish?) but it didn't work well and was replaced by OCG (which eventually proved unmaintainable due to the above issues and lack of resourcing). ___ Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] New PDF Render decommissioned on 1st January 2020?
Hi Tisza. thanks a lot for your answer. A Chromium based solution is certainly one of the best you can get. Its cheap in computational resources and updates should be available for a long time. Sorry for creating unnecessary work for you. I just figured out from the following link that the new renderer was based on mwlib and reportlab. But that dates back to April 2018 and was last updated in August 2018 and obviously this information is outdated now. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/PDF_Functionality also these two pages seem to contain the same outdated information. https://www.reportlab.com/opensource/ https://www.reportlab.com/casestudies/wikipedia/ Yours Dirk On 3/17/19 8:14 PM, Tisza Gergő wrote: There are two different PDF renderer tools: the single page PDF renderer ("Download as PDF" link in the sidebar, via the ElectronPdfService extension [1]) and the article collection renderer ("Create a book" link, via the Collection extension [2]). The single page renderer is today served by a tool called Electron [3]; it's in the process of being replaced by a new tool called Proton [4]. These are both node.js services which manage headless Chromium instances - which means the actual rendering engine will stay the same, so no user-facing changes are expected. The switch is for operational reasons: Electron crashes periodically, and has been written before the Chromium project provided an official library for remote-controlling headless browsers, so it didn't take advantage of that. Proton is currently getting mirrored traffic (ie. it is deployed in production for testing purposes, and both it and Electron render the PDF files requested by users, but only the one from Electron is returned). The collection renderer used to be served by a tool called OCG [5], which has been decommissioned about a year ago. It also functions as a frontend to PediaPress [6], who create print-on-demand books of Wikipedia content. They use mwlib internally (and are the main developers of it). I believe they plan to provide PDF download functionality eventually. So in short, the WMF is not involved with mwlib development, you should probably contact PediaPress (see [7]) if you have questions about that. The PDF renderer project at the WMF is not related to mwlib and not affected by the Python 2 life cycle. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ElectronPdfService [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Electron [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Proton [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Offline_content_generator [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Book_tool/Help/Books/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_is_PediaPress? [7] https://pediapress.com/code/ ___ Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] New PDF Render decommissioned on 1st January 2020?
There are two different PDF renderer tools: the single page PDF renderer ("Download as PDF" link in the sidebar, via the ElectronPdfService extension [1]) and the article collection renderer ("Create a book" link, via the Collection extension [2]). The single page renderer is today served by a tool called Electron [3]; it's in the process of being replaced by a new tool called Proton [4]. These are both node.js services which manage headless Chromium instances - which means the actual rendering engine will stay the same, so no user-facing changes are expected. The switch is for operational reasons: Electron crashes periodically, and has been written before the Chromium project provided an official library for remote-controlling headless browsers, so it didn't take advantage of that. Proton is currently getting mirrored traffic (ie. it is deployed in production for testing purposes, and both it and Electron render the PDF files requested by users, but only the one from Electron is returned). The collection renderer used to be served by a tool called OCG [5], which has been decommissioned about a year ago. It also functions as a frontend to PediaPress [6], who create print-on-demand books of Wikipedia content. They use mwlib internally (and are the main developers of it). I believe they plan to provide PDF download functionality eventually. So in short, the WMF is not involved with mwlib development, you should probably contact PediaPress (see [7]) if you have questions about that. The PDF renderer project at the WMF is not related to mwlib and not affected by the Python 2 life cycle. [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ElectronPdfService [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Electron [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Proton [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Offline_content_generator [6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Book_tool/Help/Books/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_is_PediaPress? [7] https://pediapress.com/code/ ___ Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors