Might be neat, but this is a low priority as browsers are already quite capable of printing articles and/or printing to a file.

svasti_cattery wrote:

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.

File > Print... > Save to File

On most modern operating systems you should have the option to print to a PDF file already.

wiki wrote:

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.

robchur wrote:

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

gangleri wrote:

*** Bug 3751 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

sbenza wrote:

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.

felipe.sanches wrote:

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...

felipe.sanches wrote:

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/

felipe.sanches wrote:

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

npopok wrote:

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

jeluf wrote:

*** Bug 11623 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Mass compoment change: <some> -> Export/Import

mike.lifeguard+bugs wrote:

Some discussion:

• http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2008-August/001299.html
• http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2007-December/001217.html
• http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2007-November/001178.html
• http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2007-September/001144.html

Some options:

• Extension:Collection: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection & http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_to_print
• Extension:Pdf_Book: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Book
• Extension:Pdf_Export: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Export
• Extension:Pdf_Export_Dompdf: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Pdf_Export_Dompdf

And there's a tool on the toolserver:

• http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/pdf.php

Currently it seems as though the Collection extension will be the best bet to have this integrated into our production sites.

mike.lifeguard+bugs wrote:

(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.

dirk.hunniger wrote:

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.