Norman L. DeForest wrote:
>
> On Sun, 14 Aug 2005, Serious_Practitioner wrote:
>
>> Good day -
>>
>> I have a page from which users can download a number of documents. These
>> are all in .pdf format, and I know that some folks will need to get the
>> Reader software.
>>
>> Does anyone know if Adobe offers a code snippet to link to a button and
>> link the button back to the appropriate page on the Adobe site? I can
>> blunder my way through this if I have to go find the Adobe button and
>> then hook some code to it, but it's be easier to get the right thing on
>> the first try. I did look through the Adobe site, but even searching the
>> site with Adobe's own search function didn't give me anything close to
>> this.
>>
>> Thank you all again for your help, not only with this, but in the past.
>
> Someone else has already posted the URL for Adobe's "Download" page but
> I have one suggestion that could make your site a bit friendlier for
> the visually-impaired or others who can't use the Adobe reader.
>
> Adobe has a PDF-to-HTML-or-text converter script on their site.
These rarely work. I usually generate HTML from the LaTeX. Once compiled,
any PDF2HTML conversion tool I tried failed miserably.
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/05/24/pdf-to-html/
> It has been moved and changed since I last used it.
>
> While their former form used action="POST" (and only converted to HTML)
> their script also accepted GET so you could create links to their form
> that automatically converted your PDFs. It didn't work for anything that
> relied on images for the data but it did a fairly good job with PDFs that
> were primarily text.
There are Open Source tools that take an HTML and covert it to PDF's on the
fly. There are also option panels for endless customisation of the output.
I saw it used in Mambo server and I also use it in WordPress:
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2005/07/12/wordpress-and-pdf/
By making use of such conversion tools, you make your content open to
/everyone/. PDF sits 'on top of' HTML rather than maintaining PDF's that
are oddly converted to something more open.
> I haven't tested their new form (which asks for more data than the old
> form) to see if it work with GET or not. You *could* create a form of
> your own for each PDF file of yours that has the same fields with the same
> questions but with the URL for your PDF file already filled in (or,
> perhaps, use a drop-down menu to select which of your PDF files to
> convert).
>
> The URL for their Accessibility site is:
> http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/accessibility/main.html
>
> Their PDF converter is now at (and a user can now select text or HTML):
> http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/access_onlinetools.html
I found that people and crawlers are unhappy with PDF documents. They take a
long time to open unless you use KGhostScript or similar software. They are
also harder to search, copy from and the list goes on and on. Nothing new
here...
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