PDF generation tests, March 2008
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 setEdit
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:
- en:Borbera - A short article with an infobox and a non-printing stub template
- en:Flag of Armenia - Today's Featured Article; has lots of floating SVG images and references, some infoboxes.
- en:Experimental Assembly of Structures in EVA and Assembly Concept for Construction of Erectable Space Structures - Has a really long title, some awkwardly-sized floating images, and uses unit conversion templates and references extensively
Test procedureEdit
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):
- Printed each article to PDF from Firefox 3.0b4 on my iMac
- Did an individual 'Download as PDF' via mwlib for each page
- 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.
ResultsEdit
NotesEdit
General issuesEdit
- 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
BorberaEdit
- 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 ArmeniaEdit
- 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 ....Edit
- 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"
CollectionEdit
- Some of the page breaks seem to be different from the individual downloads