[LON-CAPA-users] Lon-Capa, PDFs and iOS
Stuart Raeburn
raeburn at msu.edu
Sat Mar 8 14:24:11 EST 2014
Doug,
> ... 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.
I have modified lonpage.pm (rev. 1.104) so that the text:
"It is recommended that you use an up-to-date virus scanner before
handling this file."
is not shown for a link in a Composite page if the file linked to is a pdf.
lonpage.pm rev. 1.104 will be included in the forthcoming 2.11.0.
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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