Bjoern,

That looks like an great project!  I spoke to some of our offline group, and 
there are a couple of people who know MWoffliner well, and who could help with 
this.  I’ll be in contact to see if we can set up a Skype or other group call.

Cheers,
Martin

Prof. Martin A. Walker
Dept. of Chemistry
SUNY Potsdam
Potsdam, NY 13676 USA
+1 315 2672271
[email protected]
ORCID: 0000-0001-9202-0356
(walkerma on Wikipedia)


From: Offline-l [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
Bjoern Hassler
Sent: December 06, 2017 07:31
To: Using Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki offline 
<[email protected]>
Cc: Olga Vasileva <[email protected]>; Nicolas VIGNERON 
<[email protected]>; [email protected]; discussion list 
for Wikisource, the free library <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Offline-l] [Wikisource-l] FYI - WMF pausing and deprecating some 
functionality

Dear friends,

We use mediawiki to host teacher education resources for sub-Saharan Africa, 
see http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki/OER4Schools. The teacher programme has had a 
wide impact, but on the technical side, we really struggle to maintain the 
site, especially with regard to export to PDF/ePub/ZIM. We've had some expert 
help some yeas ago from Emmanuel and a WMUK grant, and made some progress, but 
esp. the PDF export wasn't really ready for prime-time.

We would really appreciate a suite of tools that was well integrated into 
mediawiki, being able to produce good clean XML/HTML5 (per page), PDF/ePub/ZIM 
(ideally respecting the various 'hooks'). In fact, we're quite desperate to 
make progress on this, as we have a new programme starting in Zimbawe. Often 
it's said that Wikipedia/CC has a 'global reach'. However, we look at the 
'legal freedom' (CC licensing, which gives "global legal freedom') vs. the 
'technological freedom', the ability to export etc. Yes, "no connectivity" is 
very slowly disappearing, bu this isn't the issue: Connectivity remains 
expensive, intermittent, and slow for a large part of the planet, so 
"technological freedom" often remains elusive - many thanks to e.g. the Kiwix 
team working on such issues.

We do work in SSA day-to-day, and we'd also love for somebody to work with us 
to look at our requirements, and see whether they could feed into the overall 
requirements. If there's any way in which we can engage with those processes at 
WMF or elsewhere, we'd be very happy to do so.

Looking forward to your thoughts!
Bjoern

On 6 December 2017 at 11:28, Federico Leva (Nemo) 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Nicolas VIGNERON, 11/10/2017 20:32:
should we try to integrate WSexport functionalities into more general tool? 
(for the second option, we need to exchange about our specific needs and 
desires).

This was already done with mwlib for ZIM and EPUB, but then WMF trashed it. 
Three years ago we were told "ePUB and ZIM are likely to return", now how much 
do you believe PDFs will ever work again?
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-ambassadors/2014-September/000958.html
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T97672
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T73660

The Italian Wikisource users have used PDF exports nonetheless for a few 
things, although they are not as useful as the ZIM exports. Please don't rely 
on assumptions about uselessness of something for you to decide that it's fine 
to make that something worse.

Federico


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