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| Guide Series | Buy This Issue Table of Contents For This Issue  E-mail
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| PC Security | |
| August 2001• Vol.9 Issue 8 Page(s) 124-126 in print issue | |
How To . . . Let Others View PDF Files On Your Site Make Sure Visitors See Your Documents Just As You Created Them |
Jump to first occurrence of:
[PDF]
[FILES]
 If you spend a lot of time working to
get the layout of a document for your Web site just right, you should know
that unless you save that document in a certain file format, it will
appear differently to different users. Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) ensures that
users will see a document just as you created it, regardless of what
computer they use to view it. You can set up fonts, images, and other
formatting in a PDF document with the assurance that other users cannot
change or alter them. This is one of the reasons this format has long been
a favorite of businesses and government agencies such as NASA and the IRS
(PDF is one of the primary formats for electronic tax forms and
publications).Another advantage of PDF documents is that they provide a level of document security that can be difficult to achieve online. When you create a PDF document, you not only keep the document text intact, you also prevent others from copying text and graphics or even printing the document. In addition, you can enable byteserving in your PDF document, which lets users view parts of your document without having to download the entire file. (We’ll talk more about this later.) With all the advantages PDF files offer, it’s easy to see why it’s a popular file format on the Web. We’ll show you how to allow others to view PDF files on your site.  Set Up Your File For
Viewing On The Internet. Before you put an existing PDF file on
your Web site, you’re going to need to configure it for Internet use. You
can set several options that will determine how your PDF document will
appear and work on the Internet. These include the options that deal with
general information, bookmarks, window options, security, byteserving, and
preferences.General information. The first thing you’ll want to do is fill in all the general information fields for your PDF document. This will give users a summary of important data, such as a document’s title and author, as well as let you set features such as establishing keywords for searching and setting binding properties. To set general information, open the document in a PDF creation application, such as Adobe Acrobat. Choose Document Properties from the File menu and select Summary. This opens the Document Summary dialog box, where you can set up a number of different general information parameters. After filling in the information you want to include, click OK. Now, whenever users want to access general information about your file, they can easily do so. (Windows users, right-click the file on your hard drive and choose Properties from the pop-up menu.) Display bookmarks. Setting up your Web-bound PDF document to display bookmarks is a great way to let your users navigate long documents. To enable bookmarks, open the document in Acrobat, open the File menu, and select Document Properties. Then choose Open Options to open the Document Open Options dialog box. Select the Book-marks and Page option to enable bookmarks in your document.
Secure your document. As we mentioned, PDF documents have a number of powerful security options to protect your documents from unauthorized access or from copying or printing them. To set these options in Acrobat, select Document Security from the File menu and choose Acrobat Standard Security from the pop-up menu. Here you’ll see a number of different options. First, you can choose to specify passwords that users will need to open the document (so that only a select group can access it. If you in-tend your document to be available to the public at large, don’t check this option or put a password in the field). You can choose whether you want to have a master password here, which will be needed to change the security choices. Un-der Permissions, you can pick an encryption level and select from a number of different access op-tions. For example, if you click No Changing The Document, unauthorized users won’t be able to make document changes. After making your security choices, click OK and save the new, secure file in the place of the old, unsecured file. Byteserving. Byteserving, also known as page-at-a-time or byte-range downloading, lets users access your PDF document a little bit at a time. If you enable byteserving on your PDF document, the Web downloads smaller bits of the document (usually a page) at a time so users can start reading it sooner, rather than waiting for the entire document to download. This is especially convenient for downloading large files over slow connections.
The second thing to consider is that users who want to take advantage of byteserving must be using a browser that supports byteserving (most 3.x browsers do) and can read PDF files. They’ll also need the Acrobat plug-in, which comes as part of the free Acrobat Reader download and is installed when you first install the Reader. Finally, you will have to optimize the PDF file itself to enable byteserving. How you do this can vary a little depending on what software you use to create your PDF document. If you are using an application such as Acrobat, you enable this feature by checking the Optimize checkbox in the Save As dialog box. Many PDF creation programs also offer the ability to optimize a bunch of PDF files at the same time, so you can select an entire folder to byteserve-enable. In Acro-bat, you can optimize an entire folder by selecting Batch Optimize from the File menu. Label your files. You’ll also want to make sure that you remember to label your PDF file with the .PDF extension. This extension will let a user’s browser know that it is a Portable Document Format file and thus enable a user’s browser to hand it off correctly to the Adobe Reader application or plug-in. Set Up A PDF File On
Your Web Site. Once you have your PDF document set so that
others can successfully view it on the Internet, it’s time to put it on
your site so that people can find it. There are a few things to keep in
mind here. First, you’ll need to actually wire it into the site so that
users can click a link and easily open it. You’ll want to include text
with the link to help users get more information about the PDF file and
even download the free Acrobat Reader if they are new to the format.
Because Acrobat already compresses PDF files, you’ll want to think twice
before compressing them again; we’ll talk more about this later. We’ve
included a couple of tips for actually uploading PDF files to your
server.Coding a page for PDF documents. In order for users to open your PDF file, you’ll need to put a link in the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language; the language of the Web) of your Web page that leads to it. Once users click this link, their browser will pass control to a program such as Acrobat Reader or the Reader plug-in, which will then handle the document. To set a link so that it opens a PDF document in this manner, type the following code into your page’s HTML: <A HREF = “filename.pdf”> PDF File </A> In this example, you’ll replace “filename.pdf” with the name of your file. PDF File is the link text that will appear on your Web page. When setting a link like this, you won’t have to define height or width dimensions, but you should tell users how large the PDF document is (either file size or number of pages). You can type this information right into your Web page next to the file link. This isn’t as big an issue for users who can handle byteserving, but for those who can’t, it can be a sizable (pardon the pun) one. If your PDF document is only one page long, you can embed it into a file much as you would a GIF (graphics Interchange Format) or JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) image. This is rather a rough way to serve PDF files (users aren’t given any toolbars or navigational or interactive features), but it is an effective way to serve smaller PDF documents. To code these small PDF documents into your page, type the following line in your HTML source code:
Again, in this example, you would replace “filename.pdf” with the name of your file. Also, because this is essentially an image file, you’ll also want to set the height and width attributes for the file by replacing the X and Y in the above example with your own image dimensions (in pixels). The more information the better. The people who view your site and attempt to access your PDF document are going to be all over the map in terms of their experience level and knowledge of the PDF format in general. Some will know immediately what they are looking at and will be fine. For others, your PDF document might be the first they’ve ever seen. It is precisely for these users that you will want to provide as much information as possible about the file. We’ve already mentioned how you should let users know how large a PDF file is. You should also carefully label the file so that users know immediately that it’s a PDF document. Adobe has icons you can use in your Web site to tell users they’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view certain files. Users who click a link and either get an error message (if they don’t have Acrobat Reader installed) or a bunch of activity they hadn’t expected may not appreciate the fact that you didn’t warn them. If you do use an Adobe icon to identify a PDF document, make sure you add a text message such as “PDF File” to the PDF icon image source tag (ALT = “PDF File”). This way, even users who have set their browsers to not display images will know what a link leads to before they click it. You’ll also want to show users where they can get the free Adobe Reader to view your PDF file. The easiest way to do this is to point to the Adobe Acrobat Reader download page. This way, users can be sure they’re downloading the latest version. Adobe allows others to freely distribute the Reader, but if you choose this route, you’ll be responsible for hosting the file on your site and keeping the version up to date. You can get distribution information, logos, buttons, and more at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/distribute.html. You can get more information at: http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html Another possible piece of information you can put on your site is for users who may want to download the document to their hard drive. If the document is large enough and the user’s connection is slow enough, this might be an even better solution than byteserving. To download a PDF file, Windows users can right-click the PDF file link and choose Save Link As (Netscape) or Save Target As (Internet Explorer) from the pop up-menu. Then the user will just choose the location on their hard drive where they want to save the file and view the document with Acrobat Reader. Encoding and compressing. You might be tempted to encode (binhex, uuencode) or compress (zip) a PDF file before uploading it to your site, but this really isn’t a good idea. Not only will the file have to be unencoded or uncompressed before users can access it, but compressing a PDF file may actually make the file a little larger. PDF creation software such as Acrobat already compresses PDF files, so you probably won’t gain anything by trying to compress it further. Upload The Files.
All that’s left at this point is to upload your PDF document to
your server. You should upload it as you would other files, such as image
files. Make sure the name and case sensitivity of the file remain
consistent and upload it via an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) application
as a binary encoded file, not ASCII (American Standard Code for
Information Interchange), which might corrupt any binary encoded security
elements. You can usually select between binary and ASCII from within your
FTP application. While you can put PDF documents on an FTP server, this
usually isn’t a good option, as FTP servers generally don’t allow for
byteserving.As long as your server can handle PDF files and visitors to your site have a recent version of the Acrobat Reader on their computer, users should now be able to easily access your PDF documents from your Web site.  by Rich Gray
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