Wikipedia
Submitted by tim
The gigantic free encyclopedia Wikipedia has a massive presence online, and is one of the most popular sites on the web. With 14 million articles, it's the largest encyclopedia ever assembled.
The open-source software that is the power behind the site is MediaWiki, collaborative software which is also used across the web in thousands of other wikis.
PediaPress have developed a plugin for MediaWiki, based on the ReportLab Toolkit, which allows you to collect content from the wiki as you move through the site, and then compile it into a book with a cover and a table of contents - all at the click of a mouse. Need a printed copy? PediaPress will print and deliver to you a high-quality, bound book.
For the printed copies, PediaPress use the typesetting system TeX to generate the books. However, this would have been completely impractal for a web based solution as it would be far too slow. Being keen users of Python, they looked around for a Python alternative, and found ReportLab.
Apart from speed, PediaPress also needed to be able to include scientific equations and formulae as images inline inside text paragraphs. So we created the specific functionality they needed and added it to our open source software for everyone to use. It's a function you won't find in other PDF libraries.
With its outstanding PDF generating capabilities, the ReportLab Toolkit was the natural choice, and as free, open-source software it's a natural partner with Wikipedia. We're proud to be playing a part in the Wikipedia story, in partnership with PediaPress.
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