[Wikitech-l] PDF Download

[Nasir Khan]

Hi,

From the very beginning, there is a problem in the PDF Download tool and
that is it can not properly render the Bengali and some of the other Indic
languages (might be all Indic languages). A few bug was reported earlier
and the developers tried to solve the issues but unfortunate it was not
completely fixed.

Here i have a question that at this moment is there any developer of
developer group is working on this issue? if yes then i want to join with
him. But is no one is engaged with it then is is possible to apply GSoC for
this issue.

I am involved with the Wikimedia Bangladesh and within a short time we are
going to arrange outreach programs outside of the city area. For that
purpose the offline version will help us a lot. That is why i am
interested.

regards
nasir khan

--
*Nasir Khan Saikat <http://profiles.google.com/nasir8891>*
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[K. Peachey]

CCing in the PP dev team, Since I don't know if any of them are on this list.

[Santhosh Thottingal]

On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 10:34 AM, Nasir Khan <nasi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> From the very beginning, there is a problem in the PDF Download tool and
> that is it can not properly render the Bengali and some of the other Indic
> languages (might be all Indic languages). A few bug was reported earlier
> and the developers tried to solve the issues but unfortunate it was not
> completely fixed.

The PDF library used with the Collection extension of Mediawiki is
reportlab. Reportlab uses its own internal rendering engine and not
capable of handling complex scripts like Indic. Such a rendering
engine will not scale to meet the requirements of hundreds of
scripts/languages that we support.

> Here i have a question that at this moment is there any developer of
> developer group is working on this issue? if yes then i want to join with
> him.

I had discussed this with Pediapress developers in the past. I
started a project many months back to develop a general purpose PDF
rendering library for complex scripts and I had announced it here:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-February/002198.html
And I have an online version based on the code in development
http://silpa.org.in/Render. It can create PDFs from Bengali wiki pages
and possibly most of the scripts that we support. The text rendering
engine used is Pango. This is my petproject and 2-3 people joined me,
but recently it is inactive in development since we are not getting
free time. The library require lot of work to reach a reasonably
usable state. Then it require good amount of effort to integrate with
collection extension.

The project is hosted at https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pypdflib
and available in Debian.

Thanks
Santhosh

[Sumana Harihareswara]

On 03/03/2012 10:25 PM, Santhosh Thottingal wrote:
>> Here i have a question that at this moment is there any developer of
>> developer group is working on this issue? if yes then i want to join with
>> him.
>
> I had discussed this with Pediapress developers in the past. I
> started a project many months back to develop a general purpose PDF
> rendering library for complex scripts and I had announced it here:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-February/002198.html
> And I have an online version based on the code in development
> http://silpa.org.in/Render. It can create PDFs from Bengali wiki pages
> and possibly most of the scripts that we support. The text rendering
> engine used is Pango. This is my petproject and 2-3 people joined me,
> but recently it is inactive in development since we are not getting
> free time. The library require lot of work to reach a reasonably
> usable state. Then it require good amount of effort to integrate with
> collection extension.
>
> The project is hosted at https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pypdflib
> and available in Debian.
>
>
> Thanks
> Santhosh

Santhosh, it looks like Nasir might be interested in working on this as
a Google Summer of Code project:

> ... Is [it] possible to apply GSoC for this issue.

If this is the case, Santhosh, would you be interested in possibly
mentoring Nasir?

--
Sumana Harihareswara
Volunteer Development Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation

[Santhosh Thottingal]

On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 12:00 PM, Sumana Harihareswara
<sum...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> Santhosh, it looks like Nasir might be interested in working on this as
> a Google Summer of Code project:
>
>> ... Is [it] possible to apply GSoC for this issue.
>
> If this is the case, Santhosh, would you be interested in possibly
> mentoring Nasir?

Yes. If anybody come forward. I can mentor this project.

Thanks
Santhosh

[Volker Haas]

Hi all.

I just wanted to confirm that Santosh's description of the current
limitations of the PDF rendering engine are accurate.

Regarding the GSOC project: As the principal developer of the current
PDF rendering I'd also be happy to share insights on PDF rendering. Let
me know if I can do anything to help.

Best Regards,
Volker

--
Volker Haas
Senior Developer
brainbot technologies ag
Boppstraße 64
55118 Mainz
Phone: +49 (0)6131 2116394

[Nasir Khan]

Hi Santosh,
In some other thread of this mailing list i found that TCPDF(www.tcpdf.org/)
have a good support for the unicode, but i just downloaded the code and
tried it. I found that it also have some issues on for the Bengali/indic
texts. Have you tried with this library?

I will apply for the GSoC on this project and before staring on a specific
tool i would like to study the other existing tools. Because though they do
not have to full support for the languages but they are good at some
points, like Render can render the texts properly and existing pdf tool
works well with the collection extension.

thanks
nasir

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 4:55 PM, Volker Haas <volke...@brainbot.com>wrote:

> Hi all.
>
> I just wanted to confirm that Santosh's description of the current
> limitations of the PDF rendering engine are accurate.
>
> Regarding the GSOC project: As the principal developer of the current PDF
> rendering I'd also be happy to share insights on PDF rendering. Let me know
> if I can do anything to help.
>
> Best Regards,
> Volker
>
> Am 04.03.2012 07:30, schrieb Sumana Harihareswara:
>
> On 03/03/2012 10:25 PM, Santhosh Thottingal wrote:
>>
>>> Here i have a question that at this moment is there any developer of
>>>> developer group is working on this issue? if yes then i want to join
>>>> with
>>>> him.
>>>>
>>> I had discussed this with Pediapress developers in the past. I
>>> started a project many months back to develop a general purpose PDF
>>> rendering library for complex scripts and I had announced it here:

>>> http://lists.wikimedia.org/**pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/**
>>> 2011-February/002198.html<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2011-February/002198.html>

>>> And I have an online version based on the code in development
>>> http://silpa.org.in/Render. It can create PDFs from Bengali wiki pages
>>> and possibly most of the scripts that we support. The text rendering
>>> engine used is Pango. This is my petproject and 2-3 people joined me,
>>> but recently it is inactive in development since we are not getting
>>> free time. The library require lot of work to reach a reasonably
>>> usable state. Then it require good amount of effort to integrate with
>>> collection extension.
>>>

>>> The project is hosted at https://savannah.nongnu.org/**projects/pypdflib<https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/pypdflib>

>>> and available in Debian.
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> Santhosh
>>>
>> Santhosh, it looks like Nasir might be interested in working on this as
>> a Google Summer of Code project:
>>
>> ... Is [it] possible to apply GSoC for this issue.
>>>
>> If this is the case, Santhosh, would you be interested in possibly
>> mentoring Nasir?
>>
>>
>
> --
> Volker Haas
> Senior Developer
> brainbot technologies ag
> Boppstraße 64
> 55118 Mainz
> Phone: +49 (0)6131 2116394
>
>
>

> ______________________________**_________________
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>

--
*Nasir Khan Saikat <http://profiles.google.com/nasir8891>*

[Tei]

For everyone working on this type of things: Thanks!, you guys and
gale are my personal hero :D

Countless PHP apps need to create PDF files one way or another. Is a
serius pain in the ... Or usually is. I never tried TCPDF.

Will these PDF files in UTF-8 urdu/other be readable?, It will be
funny if the people with computers configured for urdu/other don't
have a unicode font with urdu glyfhs, and use normal fonts (not
unicode aware) to write text/ read texts.

--
--
ℱin del ℳensaje.