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

[Mills, Douglas G]

Beautiful! Thank you!

Doug

-sent from mobile-

> On Mar 8, 2014, at 1:25 PM, "Stuart Raeburn" <raeburn at msu.edu> wrote:
> 
> 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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