I am designing a new user interface and have the created images for each new screen. Now I want to combine these images in a clickable PDF so that by clicking on buttons within the images you can navigate from one screen to another.
What is the easiest way to create a clickable PDF? (Free Tools?)
Pencil Project is a free prototyping tool that allows you to create clickable PDFs.
http://pencil.evolus.vn/Default.html
Good luck! Some people use Microsoft Excel for prototyping, but I'm not recommending doing that.
Related
I want to extract the coordinates of a PDF document with the help of a mouse click. I have gone through some posts but since I'm new to this, I'm not being able to understand it properly. Also, can this be done if I render the PDF file in a web page?
You can add javascript to a pdf document. Although you only get access to a limited subset of the language.
If you only need the coordinates once (for instance when doing layout of the document), you can simply open it with adobe and activate the rulers/grid option to see where your mousepointer is currently located.
Is there any API in js or .net or any other free tool through which page coordinates can be obtained in a pdf? Basically, I have a pdf file which contains images so I have read the coordinates on click inside the pdf document.
*coordinates here refer to .pdf page coordinates and not pixel coordinates, however I used itext library but couldn't figure out the solution.
In order to read the coordinates of an image when it's clicked on in the PDF, you're going to need to use a PDF viewer that is capable of running scripts. Unfortunately, there are only a few of those and they all implement only a portion of the Acrobat JavaScript API but the Acrobat JavaScript API can't tell you anything about images or their location so it's doubtful that any of the others would. However, you could create a plug-in to Reader and/or Acrobat and add that functionality but then all of your users would need to install both Acrobat/Reader and your plug-in.
Assuming I understood the user experience you are looking for, I don't think it's possible without a customized viewer.
I want to do a mock-up GUI within a pdf file. Basically, it's a series of pages. If you click button A on a first page, for example, it goes to the third page, if you click button B, it goes to the second page, etc. I want to know if there is tutorial, video for this and what software should I use?
Thanks.
If you have Acrobat (not reader -- standard or professional), creating clickable links within PDFs is as simple as click and drag. E.g. as documented here:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/graphics_multimedia/3439118.htm
"You need the full Standard version of Acrobat or better, go to tools->Advanced Editing->Link tool. Draw a rectangle around the text to link and it will prompt you for link options (in-document, web URL, link colors, etc.)"
The pdf requirement is an odd one and will make this difficult. If you are just looking for a mockup GUI there are better ways to do it!
Here's a free one:
http://www.10screens.com/
Here is a popular one:
http://www.balsamiq.com/
And here is a previous question on this that you might find useful:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/156755/tools-for-creating-a-user-interface-prototype
Good luck!
Create your GUI mockups with MockupUI and export the designs to a PDF document, one screen per page. Then you can open it in Acrobat and add page links.
I am working on a website providing massive amount of PDFs for download and I am trying to improve the website accessibility. All I can think of is:
Provide equivalent content for the PDFs when possible (text or HTML for example).
Provide description for the PDF documents before the use can download them.
Make it possible to search within the PDF files when the users use the website search.
Make the links to the PDFs labelled by a nice icon.
Inform the users that they will need a third party application (Acrobat or other PDF viewers) in order to open the documents.
Are there other ways to improve it?
Like Jared said, assistive technology works decently with PDFs. The question is what kind of quality control do you have. There is a few different ways of putting together a PDF. One way is scanning a document and the result is a PDF made out of images. When assistive technology hits it, all it says is image image image, great help right?
Now Adobe built in an Optical Character Recognition ability (second way), which has improved over the years, but is far from quality. For example, I was given a PDF that had OCR on it. One of the first lines had the word Articles, in italics, the OCR spit out Art/e5. The third way is to produce PDFs containing actual text. Now Office 2007/2010, have the ability to save as a PDF. Before hitting save, click the options button and ensure the "document tags for accessibility" box is checked.
PDFs have a tag structure, like HTML, found via the Tags panel/pane. The output in 2010, is a bit cleaner than 2007, but I still recommend something like Commonlook Office to create your PDFs.
4.Make the links to the PDFs labelled by a nice icon.
You could put an icon within the link. Some people do:
Link text <img src=".." alt="PDF icon"/>
Some people using assistive tech just browse via links, so they won't know it is a PDF before they open it. So, it is better to do:
Link text <img src="" alt="PDF"/>
5.Inform the users that they will need a third party application (Acrobat or other PDF viewers) in order to open the documents.
It is a good idea to do this, in fact Section 508 requirements say to do this. I recommend linking to Adobe Reader for two reasons.
1- if the person does not have a PDF viewer, they'll probably call their "computer expert" who probably heard of Adobe Reader, and knows the site isn't pushing some ad-ware.
2- Adobe Reader has the most built-in accessibility of the readers out there, to my knowledge. So, why would you not give the best.
There are several things you can do to improve the accessibility of the PDFs themselves.
Provide "Alternate Descriptions" for images
Provide "Replacement Text" for items such as equations or abbreviations
Replacement Text can also be used to hint at the pronunciation of names
Mark the language, especially if it is mixed
This will assist a screen reader in properly understanding the PDF. This isn't crucial for pages that contain only text in regular paragraph layout - the reader can usually figure things out. If there are pictures, captions, jargon, names, etc, this will greatly improve the reader's performance.
I'd like to make my app to open a specified PDF by an external app of the user's choice on the iPad. How can I do that? Or, is there any open-source PDF reader framework available so that I can put it into my app?
My situation in more detail:
I'm thinking of porting to the iPad from OS X / rewriting from scratch for the iPad an app which manages lots of PDFs (journal articles, etc.), but I don't want to write the PDF reader part, because there are many good ones already out there; I don't want to reinvent the wheels.
(You might say you shouldn't reinvent pdf management apps, but I'd like to make one as a front end to SPIRES, and there isn't one so far.)
As the app would be a front end to a serious reading activity, UIWebView's pdf capability is not enough.
Also, users of my app would have various preferences which app to use.
That's the background behind my question. Thanks in advance!
Here's my self-answer:
Use UIDocumentInteractionController. See this Apple doc.
The problem now is to find a way to choose programmatically exactly with which app you open a document, when multiple apps are available to a same file type.
Its not that hard to view PDFs without a UIWebView. You use some Quarts 2D drawing but a large majority of the work is done for you. You mainly have to choose how you will flip pages, and do pinch to zoom.
Quarts 2D PDF reference
You aren't able to search inside of PDF files. You can't access the text. You could do annotation, but it would be a hack at best.