Andrew,
1) 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" ?
2) 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.
4) 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.
5) 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.
6) 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