images and html rendition

[greenmorpher]

Well, I'll be blowed! Only problem, of course, is that most of the world can't see them.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes", the secrets of how type can help you to sell or influence, and "How to Start and Produce a magazine or Newsletter", now at the new low price of $29.95. See these books and more at http://www.worsleypress.com or Amazon.

[martin]

As I think you've discovered, there's no way for NWP to automatically convert all your graphics from PDF to something else when saving as HTML. We could add it as an option to the HTML export process, but I'm not sure how many people use such a feature. Perhaps it might be better to allow macros to convert images, that way one could customize the image formats that are chosen to be converted and what format they are converted to.

[martin]

Well - it depends on your provider too:

That's very odd! The only thing that comes to mind is that mac.com hasn't set the MIME type for PDF files to be an "image" type, but I'm no expert at these things.

Actually, mac.com is behaving very strangely- I just tried to visit your page again and now Safari downloads the HTML to my desktop instead of showing the page. Also, visiting the image URL directly (http://homepage.mac.com/elbrecht/sir.pdf) says the file doesn't exist. So that's probably the real problem, not the PDF image type.

[Elbrecht]

Hi Martin -

you are right with "dotMac/MobileMe" at the time - the behaviour if anything is beyond description. I just wanted to showcase at Apple - but failed. Other providers get it right.

# # #

Just had to re-edit the above, because it's all my fault only - mea culpa! - "dotMac/MobileMe" is case sensitive, home desktop and other providers are not. So just copying files along makes this difference visible only! There is no problem with embedded PDFs at Apple - users get case sensitive for html, pdf, etc files now!

Sorry for trouble...

HE

[feat]

I'm not sure how many people use such a feature

Probably the people who, like me, have to compensate for Nisus' pdf-rendition shortcomings, as mentionned earlier in this thread. I don't mean to be aggressive, nor offensive, but it's such a pain on the user's side that these problems have to be solved at html-rendition time, not afterwards!

Acrobat (I'm running version eight.something) converts any pdf to html — albeit quite imperfectly — by first converting pdf graphics to jpeg, png or tiff format, then embedding them with an appropriate img tag:

Code: Select all

<img width=561 height=128 style="display:block; float:none" src="images/img_0.jpg">

Unfortunately, it does so much damage to the text-layout proper — especially when rendering tables or columnar data — that it's unusable as is.

[greenmorpher]

Martin sez:
[q]there's no way for NWP to automatically convert all your graphics from PDF to something else when saving as HTML. We could add it as an option to the HTML export process, but I'm not sure how many people use such a feature.[/q]
In reality, Martin, you would need three output formats I would think: PNG, JPEG (not JPG2) and GIF. You would need to offer a couple of mode options -- grayscale or RGB, and choice of resolutions -- 72, 96, 144, 300 (72 and 96 for screen, 144 for ebooks, 300 for print). Have it available for ANY graphic content of a document, regardless of its source, with the option just to convert PDFs.

As for the question of how many would use the feature -- I would suggest the potential is there for quite a lot of use. One use is that today we can all import ginormous images direct from cameras or phones. If we could dump those into a document we might like to output as HTML and know that we could edit them for resolution and therefore file size on export, would be great.

Same goes for PDFs, obviously. Since only a limited number can look at them, then conversion to GIF, JPEG or PNG is a must.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes", the secrets of how type can help you to sell or influence, and "How to Start and Produce a magazine or Newsletter", now at the new low price of $29.95. See these books and more at http://www.worsleypress.com or Amazon.

[martin]

That's a good point Geoff, it would be nice if HTML (and possibly other formats) export allowed image resolution/color conversion. I imagine a lot of people dump huge camera photos straight into documents without thinking of consequences for downloaders.

[greenmorpher]

Martin sez:
[q]I imagine a lot of people dump huge camera photos straight into documents without thinking of consequences for downloaders.[/q]
You're talking about my elder daughter and her illustrated emails of her babe to my wife who is in Timor-Leste on dial-up -- and chancy at that! I keep telling her...

What we're looking for here, of course, is for you guys to write or beg, borrow or steal (what about having a word with Lemke?) an illustration rendering machine (surely something exists in OS X?), which would intervene between our save command and the HTML filter kicking in.

Gawd, it's wonderful watching other people work!

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard, Business Writer & Publisher

"Type & Layout: Are you communicating or just making pretty shapes", the secrets of how type can help you to sell or influence, and "How to Start and Produce a magazine or Newsletter", now at the new low price of $29.95. See these books and more at http://www.worsleypress.com or Amazon.