[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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