Looking down this thread, I see complaints about lack of funding. How much is needed? and how can I contribute some so that it goes to this project and not just into WMF coffers?
Topic on Talk:Reading/Web/PDF Functionality/Flow
I mean, "thank you" sounds so insufficient whenever I see posts like these.
But let's be honest here: it's not that the WMF lacks money but that it feels it needs to spend it on other things. That there are always things we'd like to do but we can't because our resources are limited.
But our resources are always going to be limited, and there's simply no way to donate money to areas that aren't prioritised, because there's an organisational cost to doing things, keeping track of things. The new single-page renderer was deployed today! So if that's what you're looking for, hopefully we've solved the main issues. If you're talking about books, my suggestions would be to get involved with the volunteer developers working on that and see how/if you can help them, but money to the WMF will go to general support for and development of the Wikimedia wikis.
There are really two projects here.
The single-page pdf download has just been replaced by a new tool and is at least functional, though improvements would be nice.
The book rendering is being written on an unpaid volunteer basis by PediaPress. They are a commercial company and it remains unresolved as to how open the codebase will be. Progress has stopped for several months now. One way to move it forward might be to contact them direct and offer to pay for the work, however watch that licensing. Another way might be to support the WMF but they don't seem to care about the licensing, and as you can see targeting funds will be hard. Or you could contact Dirk Hunniger who has written an independent and open-source renderer of his own which appears to be functional but he has no funds to set up a sufficiently powerful server. Dirk will probably read this and reply.
I hope this helps.
Kind-of what I had guessed. Every so often I contribute to WMF, just because it is a great concept and (eventually) the whole internet may work more cooperatively. I'm a retired software engineer and don't have serious web skills, so I doubt if I could contribute skill-wise to the pdf book project. One thing I do not see here is a design document for pdf functionality. Scanning down this thread, I can derive most of the decision points, but it is really not clear precisely what the vision is. Yes, wiki articles to pdfs and assembling pdfs into printable "books", but the varying styles of related articles will make it very difficult to integrate the articles into a smooth book without manual intervention at some point in the process.
My personal interest is consolidating SciFi author (of interest to me, not all possible authors) articles, and some other things like Raspberry Pi microcomputers and similar things. These would probably be better served with a bookmark organizer than a pdf book creator, although consolidating to pdf has a lot of attraction. One of the key significances to pdf articles is that the links are "live", and I can actually use the pdf as a starting point for further reading.
Well I can not accept any funding either. I am a government employee and not supposed to have any other income. If you want to set up a server for yourself its just as easy as installing ubuntu and
sudo apt-get install mediawiki2latex mediawiki2latex -s 80
The point why I don't set up a publicly reachable server is not so much a lack of funding but more the laws made by the govermernt I am working for. There is quite a high risk that I spend the rest of my live in prison if I do so. The law is called Vorratdatenspreicherung.
If you really got too much money and want to spend it on PDF Tool development, you could hire Henning Thielemann (PhD). He is an experienced Haskell freelancer and has worked on mediawiki2latex before. He recently told me, that he is still interested in working on it, provided that funding is available.
Sounds to me as though Henning could apply for a rapid grant to get a dedicated server to run book-to-pdf batches every month. Then if that works, he could apply for a normal project grant for extensions/expansion.