I have a client that wants to put their course materials, which are already in PDF format into the iBook PDF section on the iPhone/iPad devices. I have loaded one of the PDFs and it looks great but the process is very manual and the end users are not very tech savvy or patient.
Is there a way where I can provide a link on a website that will either load the PDF into their iBook catalog if they are navigating from the device(iPhone/iPad) or load it into iTunes if they are on their PC?
As an aside would you think that a single iBook PDF would be preferrable to 26 different iBook PDFs, the course materials are currently broken into lessons. The initial download times would pretty much be the same, if there is an automated process. The concern for me is the order the PDFs are displayed on the device and that the library would look cluttered and make the overall experience less than ideal.
I answer this for completeness purposes. There is not currently (9/2010) an automated process for installing a book into iBooks, there are a couple of apps that you can install on your iPhone/iPad and you can always import into your iTunes.
If something changes in the future I will update this answer.
Related
I want to implement an iOS application which views PDF files. I have used vfr/Reader in some other applications before. But now i need to display multimedia supported PDF files on iOS which include videos, animations etc. My customer create these PDFs by using InDesign.
I made a research and can not found a proper iOS based framework to achieve this. There are really limited number of solutions like Adobe, FastPDFKit etc but they are so expensive and there is no "one time fee" option.
Do you have any open source suggestions or the ones with lower prices?
EDIT: Made a research for days and days but there is no solution. Is there any other tool to create interactive ebooks or magazines? May be HTML5 or something with editor itself???
I have used QLPreviewController before to open local PDF files and it works great and it not hard to implement-- and it supports multiple documents.
Heres a good tutorial that I followed:
http://mobiledevelopertips.com/data-file-management/preview-documents-with-qlpreviewcontroller.html
I have not tested viewing videos or anything-- the PDFs I had were simple. But it is an Apple control and has all of the basic PDF viewing functions like pinch to zoom, but like I said my PDFs only had text but it is worth a shot to try.
After a long long research and discussions, unfortunately there is no free solution with these features. There are only paid solutions and Adobe Publishing Suite takes the head although it is one of the most expensive solutions
I just got a new gig with a startup, they have a design studio that creates mock ups in photoshop and then sends them to me ( I am the UX designer ). Now they started talking to me about a process of defining how many pixels are needed for the dimensions of every png and jpeg and all the other mockups and installing photoshop on my machine, so I can figure out the dimensions when I open the psd files.
To me it sounds normal for the design studio to give me some assets and provide a file with every asset and its dimensions ( as in, this is an icon, size is (46x80), as opposed to me opening the asset in psd and figuring that out myself.
I was wondering what do other companies do? What is the process in place between the mock up design studio and the actual UX programmer who translates those assets into actual screens?
Thanks.
There is no "standard". It's generally best to let the designers provide individual files since they're the Photoshop experts and may be tweaking the images over time. You may have to provide them a list of files with descriptions, format, size, and variations (enabled, disabled, active). We ask for retina sizes and then have a tool to generate non-retina ones.
We like to use Google spreadsheets for the list of files and DropBox for the actual transfer.
Having said that, you should have Photoshop and learn to use it because there will be times where a graphic needs a tweak and you don't want to wait on someone else.
So who is actually designing the experience? Is it your job to code it? Or, are you the guy that is supposed to come up with the wireframes and then them do the visual design according to that?
With the company I work at (and in my freelance work) I'm rarely given the exact sizing of any assets, unless there's a specific requirement.
For the most part, when building a new site (or amending an existing one), I don't find out the sizes of anything until I open up Photoshop and start cropping.
I need to build a small PDF library that will display many catalogs, the user will be able to view the document and go thru pages but he will not be able to download or share the documents in any way, somehow to work like Google Books (here an example).
I have in mind something like the Google Drive API or some kind of Scribd API, but I don't know if one of those will work, I would like to know if there are more options for these application or the mentioned before will do the job.
Edit: Forgot to mention, all this done in a web browser.
In principle all you need would be the ability to render pages from a PDF file into an image. Your application (you didn't mention where you want to build this) is then responsible for displaying the images, scrolling, moving from page to page etc...
If this is correct there are multiple possible libraries that can do this:
- ImageMagick can convert PDF to images (http://www.imagemagick.org)
- GhostScript has extensions for PDF and can convert PostScript or PDF into images and other formats (http://www.ghostscript.com)
- I'm sure there are many, many more...
There are also a number of commercial tools, for example those from Adobe (licensed through DataLogics, http://www.datalogics.com) and callas software (http://www.callassoftware.com - I'm affiliated with this company)
I have searched using many different terms and phrases, and waded through many pages of results, but I have (remarkably) not seen anyone else addressing, even asking, about, this issue. So here goes...
Ultimate Goal: Allow a user viewing a content-based page (may contain both text and images) within a Windows Store app to share that content with someone else.
Description
I am working on taking a fair amount of content and making it available for browsing/navigating as a Windows 8/WinRT/Windows Store (we need a consistent name here) application. One of the desired features is to take advantage of the Share Charm, such that someone viewing a page could share that page with someone else.
The ideal behavior is for the application to implement the Share Source contract which would share an email message that contained some explanatory text, a link to get the app from the Windows Store, and a "deep link" into the shared page in the application.
Solutions Considered
We had originally looked at just generating a PDF representation of the page, but there are very few external libraries that would work under WinRT, and having to include externally licensed code would be problematic as well. Writing our own PDF generation code would out of scope.
We have also considered generating a Word document or PowerPoint slide using OpenXML, but again, we run up against the limitaions of WinRT. In this case, it is highly unlikely the OpenXML SDK is useable in a WinRT application.
Another thought was to pre-generate all of the pages as .pdf files, store them as resources, and when the Share Charm is invoked, share the .pdf file associated with the current page. The problem here is the application will have at least 150 content pages, and depending on how we break the content down, up to over 600. This would likely cause serious bloat.
Where We Are At
Thus we have come to sharing URIs. From what I can tell, though, the "deep linking" feature is only intended for use on Secondary Tiles tied to your application. Another avenue I considered was registering a protocol like, "my-special-app:" with the OS and having it fire up the application but that would require HKCR registry access, which is outside the WinRT sandbox.
If it matters, we are leaning towards an HTML/JS application, rather than XAML/C#, because the converted content will all be in HTML and the WebView control in WinRT is fairly limited. This decision is not yet final, though.
Conclusion
So, is this possible, and if so, how would it be done or where can I find documentation on it?
Thanks,
Dave Parker
I've been asked to investigate the feasibility of adding watermarks to documents when printed through our application. The documents will consist of word, pdf and cad.
The interface of the application is vb6 with a plethora of vc6 dll's.
I can see a couple of possible solutions:
Convert all documents to PDF, add a watermark and then print.
Find a print driver that will add a watermark to all documents prior to printing and install it and reenable it at runtime if it gets disabled for any reason.
3rd Party suites are possibility (we use Volo View Express for viewing CAD files) but since this application is nearing end-of-life we wouldn't want to spend too much on it.
Has anyone had any experience of the above? Any gotcha's that will bog me down?
Tracker Software has a good set of PDF api's that that will allow you to implement the solution you already have in mind. I've used their Image and PDF libraries quite a bit with a lot of success in both VB6 and .NET. Single user licenses are not expensive (depending on how you look at it I guess), and I've found support to be excellent as well.