Jinn

Anyone worked on a site design that had to integrate many dynamic PDFs? I worked on a design for a local newspaper that I'm mostly satisifed with, but not entirely. You see, they release each page of their paper as a huge (ala 75 MB) PDF, and there was no way I was going to host it like that. So I designed a little frame site that simply opened JPG screencaps of the PDF pages, so that it would load quickly. However, that makes the user unable to select text, and it is effected by browsers' annoying auto-resize functionality. Is there anyway to integrate small PDFs into a browsable website so that the majority of the PDF still displays? I'm sure in future years I could convince them to compress the PDFs before exporting, but the screen "real-estate" issue is still going to be a problem.

Any suggestions?

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ratbastid

Maybe you could get your mitts on the documents before they're pressed to PDF, and while they're still in a more web-friendly state?

PDFs just aren't web design. They're a hold-over from the bad old days of print-oriented media. They've got some nice features, if you're looking for document management, but it's not web design.

RAGEAngel9

In the worst case, I'd say convert the pdf's to html. Given it probably won't be perfect, but if you only need the text and pictures (this part would probably be hardest) just create your own pages.

noodles

indeed.
there has to be something that they have before they pdf-ize it, and i'd be willing to bet that this would be easier to work with in terms of converting it to something usable

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j0hnb

Well from my experience you could either make smaller PDF's of parts of the paper. This could be done via a script so it wouldn't cause you any more work. Or you would use PHP to write the PDF's from articles and such as needed, or with a cron job so you are creating PDF's of the articles that are on the site.

Jinn

They use InDesign exclusively.. I have a copy of it that I acquired, but I don't have a clue about how outputs can be manipulated. Anyone know how you can use InDesign to create a more web friendly file?

I tried the PDF to HTML conversions I could find, and they were absolutely horrible. The layout was compeletely wrong, the font was totally different..

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"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

Jinn

P.S. Thank you all so VERY much for the suggestions. They're far more than I got at other sites, even Web Design oriented ones.. hopefully there's an InDesign expert too

As for the PHP solution -- know anywhere I can find similar examples? I'm only familiar with PHP in a basic sense..

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"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

Anexkahn

php is great at generating pdfs, but i dont think that would help you here, because it would need smaller chunks of the original source to write from and if you have that, why not just display it in a more web friendly way.

going backwards from pdf is just messy anyway you try it. i'd concentrate on getting the articles in another form before they get pdf'd. unfortunately i dont have any personal experiance with indesign, but a few reviews say that indesign 2 supports output to html or xml, and indesign files are compatible with indesign 2.

ratbastid

I wouldn't trust ANY design program to put out decent HTML. What you want is the body copy of the articles, in machine-readable format, plus any images used in those articles. Whoever built the thing in Indesign MUST have had those. So that's who you go talk to. There is no good solution for going from PDF to HTML--as you've found, they all suck.

cyrnel

Can you read the InDesign layouts for hints? Certainly use the raw assets, but guide placement from the existing finished product. I'd code toward something like that with human eyeballs for tuning. Maybe even rendering the PDF pages as background to assist the human. Depending on InDesign's file format and allowances it could become fairly automated.

This'll be an ongoing process?

I haven't used InDesign but in a previous life worked on PS & RIP coding. Uh oh, flashbacks.

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There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195

noodles

after a little searching that i didn't do initially, you can use indesign to export to XML files which you can then parse with something you code to come up with a nice dynamic webpage.

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Moskie

depending on the complexity of the xml it exports, maybe using an xml transformation to generate the html you need would be your best bet?

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exizldelfuego

I'm having a hard time grasping the scope of this project. Are you wanting to provide a compiled straight-from-print downloadable issue paper, or are you wanting to present the articles from within the website itself? if it's the former, then simply compile each large-format PDF page in Acrobat and save it as a screen-compressed multi-page PDF. This will give you a nice, tight, easily transferable copy of the paper. But it sounds like you're going for more than that, so I'll assume the latter.

To generate the articles from within the website, all you need are two things: you need the copy, and you need any associated images.

You certainly could try the XML export coupled with a custom XSLT stylesheet to map the data from InDesign's XML to HTML, but it sounds like that's going to be a lot of work and you'll still need them to give you a file. I really don't think it's worth the hassle, especially since all you really want are txt and jpeg files.

I'd suggest taking ratbastid's approach. Think of it this way: what are the writers using to write their articles? it's not InDesign. This newspaper has to have some way it moves the copy of the articles around. It could be incredibly rudimentary (think floppy disk with loose word files) or it could be a pretty complex CMS/Database. Whatever it is, that text exists somewhere in a very accessible format.

If they can just send you txt and low-res jpeg files, you can mark them up for the website. If you want to make it dynamic so they don't have to send you anything and you don't have to mark up anything, you're going to need to get your hands dirty with a database and some server-side scripting. I recommend php and mysql.

Give the newspaper an authenticated html form where they provide the author, headline, body text, images, and whatever else they need for an article, then have php store the information into a database. On the general access website, have php load the article data from the database into an html template and voila: a perpetuating system for instant-web publishing.

Jinn

Every Tuesday they release a copy of the 25ish page newspaper to the printers, and the print copy is distributed to approximately 2000 subscribers. They also want a web "mirror" if you will, so that a reader will still be able to see all of the articles, with ideally identical layout to the hard copy. As I understand they design process, the indivudal reporters write out their articles and submit them to the editor. When the editor has had their go, it goes to the layout person who puts it, with accompanying images, into an InDesign layout, with a printed paper in mind. The last week that they did this, they simply took that InDesign layout and exported each page as a PDF. Each page still ended up as 7 MB, and was far larger than a 1024 x 768 document could ever be. The scrolling was obnoxious.

__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

Jinn

Here's an example page;



This was the JPG screencrap I used instead of the PDF; as you can see, it's HUGE and not really suitable for most browsers.

__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

Jinn

poop - no more suggestions? I'm still stumped..

__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

exizldelfuego

I'm a big fan using the right tool for the job, and based on what they seem to want, (ie an exact replica of their printed edition that can be transmitted electronically), I really think that a compiled PDF is your best route. Sure, each individual page is high-res, but if you combined them into one PDF document and saved it as low-res, Acrobat can get the file size pretty small.
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Update: Just to follow up, because at the time I was in a rush, but the core of my reasoning is that a design needs to fit its medium. The design for this paper is no doubt apparent to the printed newspaper, where you're flipping from one printed page to the next, but this same design no longer holds any value on the internet where the concept of pagination holds no value -- articles are viewed on an article-by-article nature regardless of how many pages they may take up. This is why having a database for the content is valuable, because then the content can be flowed out into paper-based designs AND electronic designs, each with their own special styles inherent to the medium.

In your case, they want the PRINTED medium to be available online, and that -- in my mind -- brings up the king of printed medium: the PDF. I think you should work towards a future where the newspaper understands the separation of design and content, and allow the content to be displayed online through the natural online medium of (X)HTML. But until that day, so long as they want the printed version of their issues available online, low-res PDFs are the way to go.