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Author Topic: For those who dislike PDFs
Tstorm
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If I have to quickly post a document to a web page, what else could I use? Let's say the original document is sent as a Microsoft Word document. Let's also pretend that Microsoft Word can't export HTML files worth a darn, because these documents don't have consistent formatting. Sometimes there are tables, nested tables, images, or other quirky Word styles embedded inside the documents. As I said, I have to post these relatively quickly, and I don't necessarily have the time to reformat them as proper HTML web pages.

I know there's a lot of aggravation against unexpected PDF links, so I try to label all the PDF links I create, including a size tag (in kilobytes or megabytes) to indicate the document size.

Any thoughts?

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James Tiberius Kirk
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Hmm, as annoying as they can be, I still think PDFs are your best option (if, for whatever reason, you can't use the original file format). Include a link to FoxIt Reader on your page.

--j_k

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scifibum
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You don't want to just host them as Word files, I take it?

You could install the Microsoft Document Imaging component of MS Office if you don't already have it, and that should give you the option to "print" with a virtual printer that can create TIFF image files. It's a widely portable/supported format, and allows you to retain the pagination.

(Doesn't work with 64 bit operating systems. *angry*.)

(Quality kind of sucks.)

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Blayne Bradley
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I don't like PDFs because their kinda slow and clunky on my computers.
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HollowEarth
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quote:
Originally posted by scifibum:
You don't want to just host them as Word files, I take it?

You could install the Microsoft Document Imaging component of MS Office if you don't already have it, and that should give you the option to "print" with a virtual printer that can create TIFF image files. It's a widely portable/supported format, and allows you to retain the pagination.

(Doesn't work with 64 bit operating systems. *angry*.)

(Quality kind of sucks.)

Whatever you do, don't do this. Posting text as images will make it invisible to search engines, unable to be resized (if say for instance someone is visually impaired) and just all around is a terrible choice.

I would just post them as pdf. There are multiple options for viewing pdfs today so complaints about adobe are misguided.

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Tstorm
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I've resorted to posting Word documents in some cases, too. I would rather post a PDF than a Word document; I have a sneaking suspicion that PDF support is more widespread than MS Word.
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fugu13
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At least any particular version of Word, yes.
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MattP
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You can try importing to Google docs and then share the resulting documents publicly.

Another option is print to PDF and then use a PDF->HTML tool to convert it to HTML. This usually presents a much better rendering than Word->HTML.

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Mucus
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I've seen a number of newspapers use Scribd to embed original documents in their articles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribd

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Tstorm
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We've also experimented with issuu (www.issuu.com).

It's not perfect, but it works for some of our PDFs.

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Achilles
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You should try winmail.dat formats. Everyone I know loves them!
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