Last modified: 2014-03-12 22:42:42 UTC
Something has changed in the way Wikipedia pages behave when they are read into Adobe Acrobat. I used to be able to produce good archival copies of articles by entering the URL in "Create PDF from Web Page" in Acrobat. But within the past week or two, something changed and the result of doing that is a mess. The attached pdf file shows the results of archiving a Wikipedia article in Adobe Acrobat on Feb. 12, 2014 and then again today, March 11, 2014. Both results were obtained in Adobe Acrobat (version 10) by selecting the command "Create PDF from Web page" and then entering the URL of the article. The only difference between the two pages of the attached pdf file is the date on which that procedure was done. Note that the result last month was clean and attractive, while the result today is a mess because of overlap of the left-hand menu with content of the article. Please also note that the Wikipedia option, "Download as PDF," is not a sufficient substitute for this procedure in Acrobat for two reasons: (1) There is no predictable URL for the result of "Download as PDF." With the procedure in Acrobat, I could generate a collection of Wikipedia articles by giving Acrobat a list of URLs on which to perform "Create PDF from Web Page" within a single file. I can't do that with "Download as PDF" because there are no URLs to use for that. (Book Creator also does not allow me to enter a list of articles to include in a book.) (2) With "Download as PDF," links in the article have no textual clue to indicate that they are links. So reading a PDF of an article made with that option, I have no idea what words are linked unless I happen to run the cursor over those word and see the cursor change to indicate a link. I hope someone can undo whatever changed that now prevents a clean PDF from being made by entering a Wikipedia URL in "Create PDF from Web Page" in Acrobat. Thank you.
Created attachment 14792 [details] Result of making PDF of article last month (good) and today (messed up)
Which Adobe Acrobat version is this about and on which platform? Looks like CSS is not properly loading. If the rendering is correct in your browser I don't see much that can be done on the Wikimedia side as we don't know how the Acrobat code fetches CSS (and other ResourceLoader related things).
It's Acrobat version 10 (or "X") running on Windows 7. That's interesting that you suggest the problem is in Acrobat. I suppose it could have been an update that changed (i.e., broke) the way it loads the CSS. I don't know what the chances are that Adobe would fix it now. I'll submit a separate request to fix the two problems with "Download as PDF." Thank you.
