Well, wikipedia have now instaled extension that allows you to order printed books via pediapress - you pick up some articles, then you see how many pages it is and you can download it as PDF or order printed copy. We could perhaps do something similar with OSM - someone chooses scale and area, then atlas is created.
OK, this would probably be computationally more intensive per page than "just some article with some words and few pictures" - question is, can we offload this task to user machines? Some java applet, that will download OSM XML, then let user customize it (whether to have a legend or not, street index, whether to include more detailed plan of some interesting areas in the atlas, etc ...) and generate the PDF and send it back for printing could do the job, while keeping server load at acceptable values (since whoever wants the PDF will use his/her CPU power to generate it :). The only caveat is that pediapress now only prints in black and white - color is planned for future. So either push them to make also colored books, or find some other company that can do this :) Martin _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
