I’ve enabled the article-to-PDF generation extension on en.wikipedia.org for live production testing. This is still slightly experimental, so the PDF download link and multi-article book collection part of it are currently limited to logged-in users only to let the load grow gradually.
We’re going to be keeping an eye on load on the PDF generation server in case we need to pull it temporarily. :)
Update: the server died for a few minutes as we had a memory leak go very bad. :) We’ve re-installed a watchdog script which automatically reboots it. PediaPress devs have been looking into seeing if they can prevent the leak. :D
I’ve been asked to point out where to report problems with page rendering — please report them to the PediaPress developers bug tracker directly, or in a pinch if you report something on our Bugzilla under the “Collection” extension component it’ll get to them as well.
Update 2009-02-27: More helpful links for folks:
Cool! I’ve tried to render the Main Page on en.wikipedia but tables aren’t rendered. :-(
On some complicated tables it’ll kind of give up :) But it’s doing pretty well on most pages these days.
It may be worth mentioning http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Book_tool , the howto manual for preparing your wiki for this tool (which answers many questions and avoids a lot of unwanted feedback on on-issues)…
Tried it on the daily FA, seems great so far, much better than the printable versions that are in plain text/images.
Yep, looks really nice!
One thing: On the “Rendering finished” page, there’s a red link to “MediaWiki:PDF Template Blacklist”.
That’s because nobody has created that page yet.
Hey, does anyone know why the PDFs rendered by this tool won’t work with the amazon Kindle 2?
From what I understand the Kindle’s conversion from PDF is notoriously flaky, but in theory it ought to do ok with something full of text. I’ll pass it on and see if we can test it out…