Displaying PDF/Image in html so everyone can be happy Options

[lcscmllr]

Hello Everybody,

Thank you for letting me ask my question.
So here it is:

I am now in charge of putting together the site for our school newspaper, and I'm really, really, close. My problem is that displaying text on a png is only good for young people with good eyes and huge monitors. Any thoughts on a solution that will make this more accessible to more people? I tried just displaying the pdf, but that didn't really help. I also tried a pdf>html converter, but a lot of the formatting was still screwed up. I'm given a pdf and an indesign to start with.

What would you guys do? Reformatting everything in html every week would be a nightmare.

Here is the site: www.willamette.edu/~lcmiller

Try resizing the window, and click on alternate pages. The main page tries a pdf, and the others try png.

Thanks in advance
Lucas

This post has been edited by lcscmllr: Mar 9 2011, 01:53 AM

[Darin McGrew]

I would just use normal text content in HTML, rather than trying to display images of text. Let go of the rigid formatting and let HTML adapt the content to the reader's browsing environment.

FWIW, my browsers are configured to download PDFs and feed them to another app. They won't display your PDFs inline.

[lcscmllr]

Thank you.
So you suggest:



TITLE OF ARTICLE
bla bla
bla bla
bla bla
bla
<picture>
bla bla

(repeat)



?

[pandy]

Yes. Why are the articles PDFs to begin with? Seems to me that's part of the problem. How much content do you get a week? One article or several?

[lcscmllr]

I get about ten PDFs a week. The designers use Indesign to design the pages or printing and then send the files to me to do what I want with them. I really want to find a way to NOT spend hours and hpurs formatting text and pictures and everything each week

[Darin McGrew]

Can you get them to send you the text content, rather than pictures of the text content? PDF is great for content that must be printed, but they're terrible for viewing content online. Images of text might be tolerable for short bits of text like headings, but they're unacceptable for body text.

See also web pages aren't printed on paper.

[lcscmllr]

Can you get them to send you the text content, rather than pictures of the text content? PDF is great for content that must be printed, but they're terrible for viewing content online. Images of text might be tolerable for short bits of text like headings, but they're unacceptable for body text.

See also web pages aren't printed on paper.

great resource, thanks

[pandy]

10 - ewww... PDFs are hard to copy massive chunks of text from also, because of the page breaks and hard line breaks.

I haven't tried one, but I've seen there are PDF to TXT converters. If they are capable of preserving paragraphs it wouldn't be too hard to join lines for each para and schmack a P around it, could be automated even.

[lcscmllr]

Acrobat does that, but the machine generated html is really poor. I'd say it's snap on 90% of the time, but the bad 10% ruins everything

[pandy]

But if you convert it to text? All markup that's needed should be a heading or two and paragraphs. And maybe an image. A style sheet fixes the rest. That shouldn't take long as long as paragraphs are preserved.

When I said automated I meant a tool that lets you decide what the markup should be. Basically you could use Find and Replace. Replace blank lines with </p><p> and you are almost there.

[lcscmllr]

But if you convert it to text? All markup that's needed should be a heading or two and paragraphs. And maybe an image. A style sheet fixes the rest. That shouldn't take long as long as paragraphs are preserved.

When I said automated I meant a tool that lets you decide what the markup should be. Basically you could use Find and Replace. Replace blank lines with </p><p> and you are almost there.

Good thought, I'll have a go at it today

[pandy]

I use a programmable text editor that makes things like this very easy. It uses a simple (well, once you know it) scripting/macro language. Write a short script once and then do every article with a click. Even if writing the script causes some brooding, in the long run I save lots of time. I'm sure there are several tools like this out there.