[LON-CAPA-users] Lon-Capa, PDFs and iOS

[Mills, Douglas G]

Thank you. That¹s very helpful. For the moment the instructor is going
with Composite Pages but with this added information he, or others, may
move in this direction due to the extended text added to the composite
pages automatically. Thank you!

Doug

Douglas Mills
Director of Instructional Technologies
Department of Chemistry
University of Illinois
dmills at illinois.edu
(217) 244-5739







On 2/3/14, 12:01 PM, "Stuart Raeburn" <raeburn at msu.edu> wrote:

>Doug,
>
>> 2. It IS possible to determine the path to a file such as a PDF
>> uploaded directly into a course site (as opposed to authoring space)
>>   and from there to create your own HTML page with links directly to
>>  the PDFs to accomplish the same as in approach 1 but with full
>> control over the look of the page linking to them. The downside with
>>  this approach is that so far the only way I've found to find the
>> path to the PDFs uploaded to the course is to upload them to a
>> hidden folder then click on each and look at the code for the page
>> they are embedded in to find the path direct to the file itself.
>
>In the current LON-CAPA 2.10.1 you can upload an HTML page directly to
>a course, and if the original page contains link tags, pointing at
>relative links, you will be prompted to upload files for each of those
>links, as long as you checked the "Upload embedded images/multimedia
>files if HTML file" checkbox when uploading the file.
>
>Those files are stored in a sub-directory tied to the particular
>uploaded content, and do not need to be placed in hidden folders etc.
>These dependencies are stored internally in LON-CAPA with the course,
>so will be migrated automatically to a new course, should you create
>one by cloning the old course.
>
>A deficiency in 2.10 was the fact that the "edit" functionality
>provided did not allow files which were dependencies (i.e., relative
>links, images etc.) to be replaced, so to make changes you needed to
>remove the uploaded HTML using the Course Editor, and then upload a
>new one.
>
>Anyway, that is remedied in the forthcoming LON-CAPA 2.11.0, which
>supports upload/replacement of dependencies in HTML files you upload
>directly to a course.
>
>So, in 2.11.0 you could include relative links (e.g., to PDF files) in
>your HTML page, and then use the "Manage Dependencies" button to
>replace those files.   You will also be able to edit the HTML file
>(e.g., to add new relative links), and then use "Manage Dependencies"
>to upload any files specified in relative links and/or the src
>attribute in img tags, which are currently not uploaded.
>
>Of course, uploading content directly to a course in this way, does
>circumvent publication to the shared content repository, thereby
>making reuse of your content in other contexts less straightforward.
>
>Stuart Raeburn
>LON-CAPA Academic Consortium
>
>Quoting "Mills, Douglas G" <dmills at illinois.edu>:
>
>> Hey All,
>>
>> I'm finally getting around to trying to address the problem iPad and
>>  other iOS users have accessing PDFs embedded in a frame on a web
>> page -- so for example any PDF uploaded by an instructor into a
>> folder in Lon-Capa. You've probably come across this -- the iOS
>> Safari somehow does not allot the correct size frame to the PDF (I
>> think is the root issue), 1-finger scrolling moves the browser
>> around and 2-finger scrolling scrolls the page up and down -- but
>> NOT the PDF inside the frame, so all the student can see of a pdf is
>>  what appears in the frame when it initially loads.
>>
>> A couple of solutions I've come up with to address this:
>>
>> 1. Use a Composite Page rather than a folder -- uploading PDFs to a
>> Composite Page provides links directly to the PDF so that it opens
>> in the full browser window rather than being embedded in the
>> Lon-Capa framework and from there iOS users can scroll up and down
>> or if they prefer open it in a PDF app on their device for
>> annotation.  The downside of this approach is that the Composite
>> Page automatically adds a lot of verbiage and warnings to a download
>>  file such as the PDF so, for example, when adding a PDF entitled
>> "Lecture 01" to the Composite page, I end up with all this:
>> [cid:0ACFF5EA-5B62-444F-913F-7653280A7D7F]
>>
>> 2. It IS possible to determine the path to a file such as a PDF
>> uploaded directly into a course site (as opposed to authoring space)
>>   and from there to create your own HTML page with links directly to
>>  the PDFs to accomplish the same as in approach 1 but with full
>> control over the look of the page linking to them. The downside with
>>  this approach is that so far the only way I've found to find the
>> path to the PDFs uploaded to the course is to upload them to a
>> hidden folder then click on each and look at the code for the page
>> they are embedded in to find the path direct to the file itself.
>> That's not a huge deal but ideally I'm looking for a solution the
>> instructors themselves will be responsible for once they learn how
>> to do it, and this seems like too much overhead for many of them.
>>
>> So I'm looking for feedback and suggestions on either or both of
>> these approaches, OR if you've solved this problem in some other
>> way, I'll be happy to hear about that as well. Again, I'm looking
>> for ways that instructors developing their course sites can make
>> their PDFs available to students in such a way that they can access
>> them and even make optimum use of them on mobile devices (should
>> note here that while I know this is an issue on iOS devices, I've
>> tested also on a Motorola Zoom I have access to and the pdf does not
>>  open in the Lon-Capa frame at all, but does work as a Composite
>> page. I'm sure the version of Android on the Zoom is outdated, but
>> do not have access to newer Android devices right now for testing).
>>
>> Thanks as always for input and guidance!
>>
>> Doug
>>
>> Douglas Mills
>> Director of Instructional Technologies
>> Department of Chemistry
>> University of Illinois
>> dmills at illinois.edu<mailto:dmills at illinois.edu>
>> (217) 244-5739
>
>
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