[Foundation-l] Printed on Demand Books from Wikipedia articles

Wed Jul 12 16:11:20 UTC 2006

Volker,

this is very powerful stuff, and it's great that you're doing it. A
couple of technical questions:

1) Are you using the highest quality images available for the PDF
generation?  Is the quality setting deliberately low?
Comparing, for instance,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/Chirpedpulse.jpg
with the image used in the PDF under "Wigner quasi-probability
distribution", the PDF image seems to have much more pronounced
compression artifacts.

2) What mechanism do you use to generate the PDF files? Is there any
chance that part of the software might become open source, if it isn't
already? I know many people who would be interested in this
functionality outside the context of Wikipedia.

If this service works well, from my perspective (I don't have any
Foundation authority) it would be great if this could be developed
into a larger partnership, with the project being featured prominently
on our side (perhaps in return for a larger percentage of the
profits).

Erik