Text is aligned on the left, which is not too bad on the screen, but looks really unprofessional in the printed version. Would it be possible to align text to the width of the page, such that all lines have same length?
Talk:Reading/Web/Projects/Print Styles
This is true for the old version. The new version does have justified text aligment.
But is it not available yet? I just pressed printed version in Wikivoyage and looked at the result...
It will be available next week
Great!
@Atsirlin The pros and cons of text alignment variations is further discussed at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T171330 See also @Maiden taiwan's post above.
1: I appreciate the desire to decrease usage of paper and ink, but for those of us with eyes that aren't so great anymore, an option to increase the font size wouldn't hurt.
2: The TOC seems to have a lot of unneeded white space. It seems likely that decreasing the leading a bit would save a whole page in this case.
3: I miss the page numbers on hardcopy.
4: An option to omit the Notes, References, and/or External Links would save 6-7 pages. They are nice, but if I really need them, I know where to find them online.
5: Extra nerdy suggestion: given that this is hardcopy, a little QR code for the URL would be a nice way to link back to the online document. Especially in cases like this example, where the URL includes an "oldid" parameter.
Overall it looks great—clean and modern!
1: I think this is a valid point, and I think long term it would be VERY handy if you could select this before rendering. But that is a more complex feature
2: I agree with you, some condensing there of the space is probably required. Ideally, I think presence of toc, (and toc numbering of headers) should be options as well. I think that it would also be very nice, if we can move the toc to not be INLINE. It should just be on a separate page, instead of next to infoboxes when printing.
3: Unfortunately, web renderers still have terrible options for things like this. There's a spec, but implementation is abysmal: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-page-3
4: I have a browser gadget that does some of this btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:TheDJ/Print_options
It needs some work atm, because it clashes with the normal print dialog sometimes. I'm pretty sure that with additional effort we can improve the new PDF rendering to also provide options like these.
5: Oh fancy idea to have a QR code !
@TJones (WMF) Thanks for the feedback!
Regarding 5: QR codes are having several user experience shortcomings:
- In most cases, you will need an extra app in order to being able to use them
- They take up quite some space (& paper & ink)
- They are not self-explaining, you need to (extensively) guide users how to use them. For an unexperienced user a QR Code would be a hurdle to overcome
A shortcode URL seems possibly to be a better alternative.
Please don't right-justify the text in paragraphs. Ragged right is easier to read. The example on the main page with right justification makes me bleary-eyed.
Some references:
@Maiden taiwan Thanks for your contribution, there's a similar concern about language-specific problems in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T171330 – I've cited you in the task.
Overall I find it good. It could be better if the line spacing within paragraphs was more consistent. Currently it's too varying and feels unsteady. In the Berlin example the line spacing for lines 1 through 4 is much more than between lines 4 and 5. (I first thought it had to do with the footnote indicators but there is none on line 2. Maybe the IPA on the first line causes more line spacing below?)
I think that is because it is a PDF of an older version. If you look at the staging website that it is based on, it seems that this was fixed. Although I note it was fixed incorrectly, for which i will file a ticket.
Related question: would it be possible to customize spacings between the paragraphs and before section headings? I find them too large and taking a lot of space. It does not hurt much if I create PDF and read it on the screen, but for travel guides, which may be printed on paper, space is a big issue.
You have a common.css, to which you can add CSS for your own printing, or MediaWiki:Print.css for something like wikivoyage.
The four smaller images in the infobox peek out more to the right than the two wider images above and below them.
Which infobox where (also, probably a known problem, that we also see on mobile, hard to fix).
Ah no, this is due to the cell padding of tables:
padding: 2px 5px !important;
Hmm, I don't see why we would add !important there.. Seems dangerous to me to have that on such generic elements. If anything it should be .infobox > * > td in that case.
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