Ambassadors (and developers),

I am tremendously happy to announce that the new PDF rendering service is live for testing on the cluster. At this time, while we shake out production bugs, it is only available via Special:Book using the 'e-book (PDF, ocg latex renderer)'. You can also render a specific page by mangling a 'Download as PDF' sidebar URL as shown in [1]. Specifically, you need to change the 'writer' GET param to rdf2latex.

Among other things, this service should have significantly better RTL and non latin language support.

We do have two known large bugs
* We do not yet have table support
* Lots of images fail to render -- this is a recent regression so we should have a fix quickly.

If you have additional bugs to report; please file a bug in bugzilla under the Collection MediaWiki extension [2].

For fun plots see ganglia [3] or graphite [4] under the ocg/pdf node.

Note: During the deployment the new renderer was available in the sidebar. This was reverted fairly quickly, but some pages may still have the link in cache. It will go away on the next page render / purge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Book&bookcmd=render_article&arttitle=Main+Page&oldid=615503846&writer=rdf2latex
[2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&component=Collection
[3] http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/?c=PDF%20servers%20eqiad
[4] graphite.wikimedia.org

~Matt Walker
Wikimedia Foundation