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Talk:Community Tech/Ebook Export Improvement

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This is an archived version of this page, as edited by Consulnico (talk | contribs) at 20:04, 2 June 2020 (→Problem to export the image on the first page in pdf format: Indentation). It may differ significantly from the current version.

Latest comment: 6 years ago by George2etexte in topic Project Overview: Request for Feedback (May 2020)

Project Overview: Request for Feedback (May 2020)

Latest comment: 6 years ago36 comments15 people in discussion

Hello, everyone! We invite you to read the content page of the project, which includes an analysis of the ebook export process and its primary issues, and share your feedback below. Thank you!

Have we covered the main reasons why people export ebooks?


  • Great resume. In our actions, we should always keep in mind that there are two types of users: contributors but also visitors to Wikisource. We have to make sure visitors have a good experience exporting books to whatever device they have. --Viticulum (talk) 19:25, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Have we covered the main methods to export ebooks?

  • Well explained. I have myself learned new thing.
    • In French Wikisource, we use mostly option "#4: Export via links at the top of text", and "#3: Export via links on the main page" when announcing new books.
    • We also have those links on the author page for each book: Ex.: See an author
    • My main concern is that external user find and understand easily how to export books. For "#2: Export via the left side panel" external user can't export a full book, and this can be misleading to them. --Viticulum (talk) 19:28, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
  • This depends on Wikisource. On czech WS we have only options PDF and EPUB, and no other in gadgets. On sk.WS there is only PDF option. Export should be avaliable on all langage versions for all users. JAn Dudík (talk) 11:30, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Have we covered the main problems experienced when exporting ebooks?

  • Yes, and I like that reliability was placed first as book export is so core to the functionality of Wikisource that it needs really high uptime. An observation that occurs near the end is crucial: "The WSExport tool is not easily discoverable, and it doesn't provide an intuitive user experience", yes this is Colleagues, who are intelligent enough and very familiar with the Web, have looked at this site and not grasped that any book on the site can be exported in a variety of formats, and it's easy to see why they miss that. MartinPoulter (talk) 18:47, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Problem to export the image on the first page in pdf format

  • Pour moi le soucis le plus gênant : lors d'un export "pdf", dans la majorité des cas (voir par exemple sur le livre https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Lorgnon_(Scribe), l'image de la page de garde ne s'affiche pas en première page, et un message d'erreur "Données insuffisantes pour une image" s'affiche à l'ouverture du fichier.

For me, the most frustrating problem while exporting an ebook in "pdf" format, in most cases (see for example for the book https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Lorgnon_(Scribe), the image on the cover page does not appear, and an error message can be seen when opening the file (in french "Données insuffisantes pour une image" => trad. : insuffient data for an image). Thanks, Laurent --Lorlam (talk) 17:36, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

This seems a side effect of changes made earlier in 2020, as this was not happening before. --Viticulum (talk) 19:33, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
Yes, this problems appears in february 2020 --Lorlam (talk) 20:43, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Which formatting and style issues are the most common and frustrating, in your opinion?

  • Many a times we add image using the crop image tool. For the web view it is okay. But if we try to download the book instead of cropped image the whole image of the page is downloaded in the book.
  • Tables are not rendered properly many a times in the downloaded book
  • sfrac template is not rendered properly in downloaded book.

--Balajijagadesh (talk) 18:27, 27 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

  • While converting gujarati Ebooks using WSExport into mobi format, the text is printed right half of the page. --Sushant savla (talk) 11:10, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
  • I have found that the main problem with "Download as PDF" is fonts. When special fonts are used, especially those that support diacriticals, the output is not always rendered in the same font. Rather, a standard font is sometimes used, one which does not support the diacriticals. There are also sometimes unexpected changes to font size that can ruin the formatting. Dovi (talk) 12:12, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
  • (Perhaps this should be in a new section, feel free to move): The first example from enWS is, in my opinion, not a good example. The markup at enWS was using the <center> tag, and it wasn't using the s:en:Template:page break template, which inserts some CSS-styled div to produce a page break in ereaders (break-after:page; page-break-after:always;). So, I think these issues are not really the fault of the WS-export tool, but rather an issue that should be fixed at enWS. Perhaps WS-export could spot "suspect" markup and make a best-effort attempt to hotfix them during export, but that would mask the underlying issue of poor markup at the source and offload the burden onto the WS-export maintainers. Inductiveload (talk) 10:53, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
  • I tried to export several books with WSexport tool. And the biggest issue was - metadata. On cs.wikisource we have on all content pages infobox with information about author, source, licence etc. And the same table was at the beginning of every chapter in exported book. There should be option to hide these informations on export and have them only once in text. JAn Dudík (talk) 11:50, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
  • @JAn Dudík: WSExport is quite simple tool which takes some pages and translates them into e-book, there is not much to document while it surely lacks in some areas. You added microformat there which is good thing. On the other hand cs.wikisource heavily relies on those metadata tables at the moment and if you exclude them from export now you will see no divide between chapters. You need to unify the style of pages, create e-book CSS, ... I am getting out of scope of this page, if you wish we can continue this talk somewhere else. --EBookian (talk) 21:20, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Which user experience issues are the most common and frustrating, in your opinion?

Which problems, overall, do you find the most critical to fix, and why?

  • Since the latest version, WSExport is slower than before. External visitors may not be patient if system too slow (they may think it is not working). When time-out is reach, message is not user-friendly for external visitors. --Viticulum (talk) 19:31, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
  • We need multi-year reliability. Multi-page export needs to be provided by a MediaWiki extension again to all the formats people need: PDF and EPUB at a minimum (but when you support EPUB, it's easy to add ZIM and ODT as well). The development and maintenance extension needs to be outsourced to a third party, with sufficient funding for at least 5 years, so that users and partners (for instance libraries) can be sure that it will keep existing in the future and not vanish overnight if a couple persons at WMF decide so. Without a reliable export, it's impossible to get national libraries and the various access methods to bring users to Wikisource. Nemo 13:45, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Anything else you would like to add?

  • I would like the developers/technical team to pay attention to eBooks in RTL languages. These are written right-to-left (E.g., Hebrew and Arabic). I hope the Export tool will also support such languages. From past expreience, such support is not automatic, and special care is needed to ensure this.--Naḥum (talk) 12:14, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Modernisation does not export

Hi ! One issue with the export is that the modernisation system that we use, at least in the fr.wikisource, does not work in exported formats because its in JS. But it cause very unpleasant reading of old texts who have been transcribed in the original version then modernised with the modernisation system. Its very convenient to use on wikisource itself but very disappointing with the export. --M0tty (talk) 12:00, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

See this example [1] for modernisation of old French: On middle/left there is "Orthographe originale" or "Orthographe moderne". This is done for each chapter. It is not possible to extract a chapter or the whole book in modernised French. This functionality is not incorporated in WSExport. I believe this would be a whole project in itself. Tpt could give more insight. --Viticulum (talk) 19:46, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
Ideally, as it seems possible to include some Javascript in an ePub, it would be great if the ePub file could contain both versions and switch from one to the other using exactly the same Javascript code as in the French Wikisource. However it's possible that this would require to load not only the "local" replacements present as a parameter of the modernisation model, but also the entire Wikisource modernization dictionary, or at least the subset of words which are found in the exported text. --George2etexte (talk) 14:13, 2 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

Math export

  • Currently on the different wiki, it is possible to activate MathML to have a nice render of mathematical formulas instead of vectorial images. The current export process does not allow to have this MathML format and include all mathematical formulas as images, like the old mediawiki way. MathML being now vastly handled, it would be really useful to be able to export the code with MathML. — Alan Talk 13:16, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Wrong date order for exports in french langage

  • Le format de la date est inversé (mois/jour/année) comme c'est la norme en anglais, par exemple aujourd'hui : "Exporté de Wikisource le 05/28/20" => c'est bizarre tout de même d'avoir le commentaire "Exporté de…" en français avec un format de date au format "anglais"

For book exports in french Wikisource, the date order is inverted (month/day/year) as it is the rule in english. For example for today : "Exporté de Wikisource le 05/28/20" => But it is strange to have the comment "Exporté de…" in french, with a wrong date order, as it is the rule in english (in french the date order in day/month/year), so, in french, we are today the 28/05/20 (and not the 05/28/20). Thanks, Laurent --Lorlam (talk) 17:48, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Bad export in "pdf" for french civility titles

  • L'outil d'export en "pdf" ne sait pas traiter les modèles de civilité entre accolades "M." / "Mlle" / "Mme" / "Mmmes" / etc… et on obtient une sortie "pdf" pas très jolie ou les caractères sont soulignés en pointillés ce qui ne les rend pas très lisibles…

The "pdf" export tool does not export correcty french civility titles that we use in french Wikisource (under embrace "M." for Monsieur / "MM." for Messieurs / "Mlle" for Mademoiselle / "Mme" for Madame / "Mmes" for Mesadames / etc…). The export in "pdf" shows caracters underlined with a dotted line, which is not well readable... (example for the distribution list of the play https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Un_gros_mot) Thanks, Laurent --Lorlam (talk) 18:16, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

  • To add a clue for this problem, someone in french wikisource said it is a problem with the {{abréviation}}
model (see here https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Mod%C3%A8le:Abr%C3%A9viation), and all others models which uses it. All these "civility titles" models are described here : https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Cat%C3%A9gorie:Mod%C3%A8les_de_titre_de_civilit%C3%A9 ... thx --Lorlam (talk) 21:00, 28 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
=> This problem has been fixed by modifying the model in french Wikisource, so Okay now ;-) --Lorlam (talk) 21:10, 31 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

e-book navigation

The way Table of Contents is translated into e-book navigation (I mean e-book reader navigation, not ToC that would be printed) is very limited. It would be beneficial if there was a way to allow editors to change the structure of e-book navigation to align better with the book structure (probably by some ToC tags). --EBookian (talk) 20:58, 29 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Long chapters and footnotes

I have observed on several occasions the case of footnotes in books with no chapters or with chapters exceeding 80 or 100 pages. The wsexport epub tool arbitrarily splits the chapter and breaks the links to the footnotes, forcing you to artificially split the chapter to get around the problem. See exemple in Histoire de l'affaire Dreyfus T.2)--Cunegonde1 (talk) 03:36, 30 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Prevent page breaks after headings

Je voudrais signaler aussi des sauts de pages intempestifs, typiquement entre un titre de section et le texte de la section, quand celle-ci ne commence pas sur une nouvelle page (par exemple, dans l’epub exporté à partir de cet ouvrage de Gauss, dont les chapitres sont eux-mêmes divisés en courts articles, comme on peut le voir sur cet exemple, le numéro de l’article et le début de l’article se trouvent souvent sur deux pages séparées). Sur le Wikisource français, des modèles ont été créés justement pour la mise en forme des titres et leur hiérarchisation, de {{t2}} à {{t6}}, à partir des balises HTML h2 à h6. Pourrait-on modifier certains paramètres, de ces modèles ou de l’export, pour empêcher un saut de page entre un tel titre et le début de la section, quel que soit le nombre de retours chariot qui le suit dans le code ?

I would like also to draw your attention on some inappropriate page breaks, basically between a section heading and the text of this section, especially when this section does not begin on a new page (for example, in this Gauss' work, whose chapters are themselves divided in small articles designated by numbers, as you can see here, the article number and the beginning of the article are frequently separated in the epub by a page break). On French Wikisource, some templates, namely {{t2}} to {{t6}}, are specifically designed to specify the style and the hierarchy of headings (based on HTML h2 to h6). Could these models or the export tool be modified to prevent page breaks after headings, whatever the number of carriage returns following it in the code ? — ElioPrrl (talk) 15:27, 30 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Initials

Initials built with the lettrine model in the French Wikisource are not properly displayed in the ePub exported files (see e.g. this play). It's a bit better in the PDF exports (the font size is a bit larger than the text, although it does not seem to adapt to the number of lines given in the « lignes= » parameter of the model). --George2etexte (talk) 14:13, 2 June 2020 (UTC)Reply

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