I’ve been using the pdf widget feature of Acrobat.com to embed an
inline pdf for some time and like it a lot and have come to depend on
it, despite its reliance on Flash. However, for various reasons (in
part the lack of Flash support on mobile devices) I’m looking for
alternative methods of achieving a similar functionality, possibly
with js or maybe a server-side app written in Ruby or PHP. Is such a
thing possible or practical or is it the equivalent of reinventing the
wheel? Thoughts?
You could probably build something server side to rip a multipage PDF into a sequence of images, I know ImageMagick can do this.
I built a feature years ago to use the photographs of book pages from the OLL to make a navigable facsimile book. This was a couple years before Amazon’s look inside feature or the Google Books site, but the same basic idea. But those photos already existed in that case.
IM can be coerced into doing this, but you have to be sure that IM was built using the FreeType library, it’s not a basic install kind of thing.
in Acrobat you can choose “save as” and specify jpg, gif or png and
it will output all the separate pages as images.
On Apr 21, 2011, at 12:03 PM, waltd wrote:
You could probably build something server side to rip a multipage
PDF into a sequence of images, I know ImageMagick can do this.
I built a feature years ago to use the photographs of book pages
from the OLL to make a navigable facsimile book. This was a couple
years before Amazon’s look inside feature or the Google Books site,
but the same basic idea. But those photos already existed in that
case.
IM can be coerced into doing this, but you have to be sure that IM
was built using the FreeType library, it’s not a basic install kind
of thing.