Hello.

As the testing of the wiki-to-print project (see WMF press release http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikis_Go_Printable) is currently in progress on labs (http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, http://de.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hauptseite), I'd like to tell you a bit about the project to open up the topic to a broader audience.

The goal of the wiki-to-print project is to add a high quality print and export facility to the MediaWiki. Users can easily collect wiki articles which are rendered as PDFs (or OpenDocument Text, Docbook, XHTML; more formats possible) or sent to print-on-demand services.

The two OpenSource software parts used to realize this functionality are

* the Python packages mwlib and mwlib.rl (http://code.pediapress.com/mwlib , http://code.pediapress.com/mwlib.rl) that contain a MediaWiki wikitext parser, tools to fetch articles/images/templates via MediaWiki API and several writers that render documents in different formats.

* and the Collection extension (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Collection) -- a MediaWiki extension that allows collecting of articles, saving/loading them as regular wiki pages, rendering documents in PDF or another format and ordering printed books from a print on demand partner like PediaPress.

We have a mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/mwlib) and a wiki + bug tracker (http://code.pediapress.com). If you have specific suggestions or problems feel free to discuss on that list or create tickets.

In coordination with Erik Möller and Brion Vibber, we are looking forward to a soonish deployment on Wikibooks and eventually on Wikipedias.

Probably lots of you have their own MediaWiki installations. We invite you to try out the Collection extension: If you have a low-traffic wiki, you don't even have to install any Python software, because you can use the public render server (which is configured by default). Just make sure that your wiki is reachable from the outside internet and has api.php enabled.

-- Johannes Beigel