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I used to do that a year or two ago and it was pretty straightforward back than (there was Export to epub link or something like this on the left pane of a Wikipedia page). Not any more! Currently, there are two options for export in the book creator, namely, pdf and plain text (only pdf for single article).

What is worse I did not manage to find any clear info on why it is not there. The article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools#PDF.2C_EPub.2C_Odt_and_LaTeX mentions it is still possible to produce epubs and re-directs to some weird page.

Do I miss anything obvious or they really disabled this useful functionality for good?

Sekhemty
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S. N.
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4 Answers4

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This feature was removed as the result of changes of the mwlib that was used for export to ocg that has better support for non-latin scripts for PDF files.

In the process EPUB export was disabled, probably because the ocg library renders to images via LaTeX (that is a guess, I have not looked at the details).

The announcement for the change was made on the wikitech mailing list,

As part of this change, we will disable ZIM and EPUB export for the time being. If you're interested in working on ZIM or EPUB support for the new offline content generator, or other export formats, please let us know via the above channels.

and it looks like it has not come back yet.

What that "weird" page does is take the source of the wikipedia page, which has the page description, and tries to render it to ePub. That should give better results than e.g. starting with the HTML version or the rendered PDF. I normally caution to not use such cloud based rendering services, but since the input you feed it is public anyway, you won't have to fear that the data you upload there gets stored for further use by the website owner.

Anthon
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  • Isn't the HTML version of a page actually the source - if not what is the difference? – mmmmmm Aug 23 '17 at 14:03
  • @Mark No. If you edit a page on wikipedia, you see the markup. That is what is converted to HTML and in the process of conversion to HTML you're bound to lose some information (or make it more difficult to access). Direct conversion from the markup would not have that problem (although it might not be able to convert all information either). – Anthon Aug 23 '17 at 14:28
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    @Anthon Thank you for the explanation. Hope it'll be back soon.

    By the word «weird» I meant the application (or at least its web version) is half-baked. It regularly gives me «Not enough resources availiable to process your request! Your request has been dropped!». When it does work, the process takes a couple of minutes (even for small pages). There is no version for Windows, the author offers to set up a virtual machine with Linux instead. Virtual machine just to export a page to epub!? I beleive it to be an outright overkill.

     – S. N. Aug 26 '17 at 15:00
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    Not to mention the page is on German Wikipedia (nothing wrong, in principle, but why). Summing it all up, it looks... well, weird (I do beleive the author effort certainly deserves appreciation, but it does not change the fact his program can not be regarded as replacement of any kind for epub export functionality). – S. N. Aug 26 '17 at 15:00
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There is an extension for Firefox called GrabMyBooks that can convert any webpage to .epub format.

It seems to me that it was also available for Chrome, but I'm not entirely sure, maybe I'm wrong.

Sekhemty
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2

The missing features are available form the following website

http://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/

Dirk
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This might not address your specific question, but I suspect that what you really want is a way to read Wikipedia articles offline on your mobile device.

I recommend the app Offline Browser app and if you have a paid subscription, you can also use Evernote. There are many other similar apps, but I think Offline Browser is the best.

idiotprogrammer
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    You're right, I'd like to be able to read article on my e-reader (much easier on eyes, then computer screen is). However, it is not possible to install any apps on it without rooting the device and I would prefer not to do that. Thanks for your advice anyway! – S. N. Aug 26 '17 at 14:55