Andrew,
- The connection to PediaPress seems unreliable. Clicking "Order Book
from PediaPress" returns an error about as often as it succeeds. I will try to record more data about this failure mode next time I see it
we are investigating but were unable to reproduce this. Do you remember whether the error message said something like "a timeout occurred" ?
- The books generated by PediaPress look amazing (I've just ordered
my first one, so I will tell you how it looks when it gets here). However, I would like to be able to adjust the cover image, and possibly list multiple editors on the cover
This is on our todo list.
- In addition to the GFDL, I would like to be able to specify
additional boiler-plate preface and appendix text, such as an "About Wikibooks" page that will be automatically included in all books (perhaps as checkbox option, if some people don't want it). This way when/if we start to distribute/sell these books, recipients will know what the book is, where to find the electronic copy of it, how to edit and improve it, etc. I'm working on a page now (at [[Wikibooks:Collections Preface]]) that people can include manually for now, but having to manually include this page in every collection we make will be annoying.
A possible solution would be to (automatically) start new collections based on a saved collections (as a template) which already includes this page. Users could remove or exchange the preface on the collection page if they have different preferences.
- PDF rendering times, especially for some of the larger books I've
tried (>200 pages) are very slow. Is this an acceptable server load?
The PDF generation runs on dedicated servers - so it will not slow down any Mediawiki. In order to make the waiting time more bearing we improved the progress messages. This should be available one Brion updates the software.
- I've noticed problems with rendering nested list structures, like:
*First *:Note about the first (this renders wrong) *Second *:Note about the second (this also renders wrong).
this bug is known: http://code.pediapress.com/wiki/ticket/81
Feel free to report other bugs using this tracker or on the technical mailinglist for this project: http://groups.google.com/group/mwlib
Heiko