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PDF generation tests, March 2008

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I've got copies of a few Wikipedia articles on my workstation's local test wiki, so decided to throw some at it and see....

Test set

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This is not an exhaustive test of features; I used a couple articles I had copies of from previous bug testing, and today's featured article, just to do an initial tryout.

I took copies of the following articles from English Wikipedia, with all their templates and images:

Test procedure

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From my test wiki, running MediaWiki current trunk, lots of extensions, plus PediaPress's Collation extension and mwlib / mwlib.rl Python utilities (with ReportLab installed from SVN):

  1. Printed each article to PDF from Firefox 3.0b4 on my iMac
  2. Did an individual 'Download as PDF' via mwlib for each page
  3. Added all three articles to a collection and downloaded it as a combined PDF

I'm only considering the PDF output here, not the generation procedure, server issues, or UI.

Results

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Notes

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General issues

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  • mwlib does some nicer formatting in places; spacing and font sizing seems a little cleaner
  • TOC listings are not shown in mwlib
  • Licensing info also seems missing, but that may be a local config issue

Borbera

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  • The infobox is expanded to full page length, and loses formatting of the heading
  • An inline interwiki link vanishes...
  • Inline URL links don't list the URLs

Flag of Armenia

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  • We see the expanded infobox issue again.
  • Inline URL links don't list the URLs
  • A block quotation is shrunken very small.
  • Some mystery extra page breaks occur with both Firefox and mwlib versions.
  • Most worrisome is that the article simply cuts off about halfway through, at 'Early Soviet Armenia and the Transcaucasian SFSR'...

Experimental Assembly ....

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  • The very long title doesn't wrap or trim cleanly in the page header
  • Inline URL links don't list the URLs
  • A reference entry is missing
  • Some mystery extra page breaks occur with both Firefox and mwlib versions.
  • Images seem to be laid out nicer in mwlib than in Firefox, which is nice! :)
  • Unit conversion templates fail to render correctly in mwlib, leaving text like "thirty-three

4.5 ft ( m) struts"

Collection

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  • Some of the page breaks seem to be different from the individual downloads