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

Thu Jul 13 09:56:11 UTC 2006

Hi Erik,

I also thank you for the comments and questions!

Erik Moeller wrote:
> 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.
>   
We always try using the best image available (in terms of resolution). 
Currently we restrict
the resolution of the images in the book to 150 dpi. This is done to 
prevent the pdfs to get
to large. However, the example you provided indicates that this might be 
to low. We will
check that and decide if we increase the maximum resolution.
> 2) What mechanism do you use to generate the PDF files? 
We implemented a mediawiki parser from scratch. The result of the 
parsing process is
an intermediate format that then gets transformed to latex (for the 
books) and to html
for displaying the articles on the pediapress website. As you probably 
guess, this is a
non-trivial process - to be precise: it's a rather difficult challenge  ;-)

> Is there any
> chance that part of the software might become open source, if it isn't
> already? 
So far it is not planned to release the parser software as open source. 
But if we can figure out
a good cooperation model we can talk about that in the future.

> 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).
>   
We would be happy if the pediapress project would result in a 
partnership with the wikimedia
foundation. I currently do not know how the details of such a 
partnership would "look like" -
but we are absolutely open to discussion in that matter.

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