Wednesday, March 23, 2011

A #PDF library with potential

#Wikipedia content can be combined and exported in the PDF or Portable Document Format. This ability is extremely powerful as it allows people to produce speciality content as readers straight from a Wikipedia and share it either printed, by mail or by sneaker net.

While awesome, the current software is deeply flawed because it does not support all the scripts and languages of our projects. The excuse has been that the library that "everybody" is using is external to MediaWiki and the problem is in this library.

Has been, but not for much longer. Development is progressing nicely on another library. A library that will support other scripts. Vasudev Kamath's first package entered debian and it is the python-pypdflib. It is experimental and it may not yet support right to left scripts properly but with its support for the scripts from India and probably Cyrillic it forecasts a brighter day.

The project page can be found here and, here is your opportunity to test the existing functionality. 
Thanks,
       GerardM

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