PDF articles visualization/download

[marchitelli]

Hi,
in OJS 2.3.3-1 I have installed, I can't visualize PDF in my browser.
I only read the text "The PDF file you selected should load here if your [...]" but nothing happens.

I can download the file only pushing the button "Download this PDF file". I tested with IE8, Chrome 7 and Firefox 3.6
On other OJS installations this feature is correctly working with the same PC and browsers.

Have you got any ideas about this matter?

Thanks,
Andrea

[jmacgreg]

Hi Andrea,

There have been reports of some issues with PDF viewing in that version. Can you take a look at the final patch here: http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=6052, or possibly try updating to OJS 2.3.3-3? (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs_download)

Cheers,
James

[cnelson]

Hi there - we're having PDF viewing issues in Firefox 3.6 on several different machines. I've tested the PDF viewer in IE8 and Chrome 6.0 and the viewing, resizing and fullscreen-ing all work in those two browsers, but in Firefox the viewing area simply shows up white. We had a couple different people with different adobe versions complain about this. We are at OJS 2.3.3.3 already. Is there any advice you have for this problem? Would it be possible to revert back to the previous way of displaying PDFs with OJS? Thanks!

CNelson

[jmacgreg]

Hi CNelson,

It won't be easy to revert back to the old way of viewing PDFs, unfortunately. Can you send me a link to your OJS install so that I can take a look?

Cheers,
James

[cnelson]

Here is my transcript of the PM conversation James and I had about this issue, which we have yet to resolve. However, we'll try the proposed solution and update if it helps.

-------------

Hi CNelson,

I can almost certainly confirm that this is a file-size issue. The problem is that it takes a very long time to load a 17+MB PDF file in the browser. Depending on the browser and/or browser PDF plugin, even if the PDF should display incrementally it may not -- it may only display once the entire PDF has been downloaded locally. This would result in you initially seeing only a white screen, but eventually (say on returning to the page) seeing the PDF. (The file will have been partially downloaded previously, and so will probably show up with a bit more waiting; or Firefox etc. may continue to download it in the background even when you leave the page.)

The best solution for your readers would probably be to split the article into multiple PDFs, and upload each individual PDF as a galley for that article, so that you have multiple galley files, each weighing in at a reasonable size. You can modify the galley label (either during the galley upload process or by clicking the "Edit" link next to the galley name in the layout listing) to something that makes more sense for your readers. For example, you can change it from "PDF" to "Part 1 (PDF)", etc. You can also upload the full PDF as well, and for example modify the label to say something like "Full article (17MB PDF)".

Cheers,
James
------

Hi James,

Thanks for your quick response! I wonder why this would be an issue only in Firefox and not in other browsers? I was able to load the full-size PDF just fine in IE, Opera and Chrome...

CNelson

------

Hi CNelson,

That's a good question; the only answer I can put forward is that different browsers (and probably more specifically, different browser PDF viewer plugins) handle PDFs differently. The file actually caused Firefox on my macbook to crash, although when I brought the page back up I could see the PDF just fine. My suspicion is that there's probably something specific to Firefox that causes problems regardless of the viewer (eg. Adobe Acrobat in Windows; Preview on OS X; etc.).

Cheers,
James

[solty]

Hi OJS team and Colleagues,
There is a problem PDF preview area with different browsers.
IE is good but not Firefox and Opera.
I was not see enought pdf viewer are for reading.
I want to fix this area about 685x850 px but not find appropriate setting file and code location.

Please see sample
http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.ph ... ew/604/547

Any help? Suggestion?
With my best regards...

[asmecher]

Hi solty,

Are you able to see the examples at http://pdfobject.com/?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[solty]

Hi Alec,
Thank you very much for your fast response.
I was try but I see only authors' names without affiliations and his/her article(s) link list.
http://www.neuroquantology.com/index.ph ... ch/authors


Best,

[asmecher]

(See http://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9773; please don't double-post as it clutters the threads.)

[MMeijer]

Hi there,

We had a problem with the inline pdf viewer in Internet Explorer.
Even with the most recent release of pdfobject.js we weren't able to get an inline pdf view of our articles, in IE.

Now, we are using URN:NBN's for article ids, so our url for an article view has the format
[domain]/index.php/[journalid]/article/view/URN:NBN:NL:UI:[digits]
where the colons will be encoded as %3A.

Because IE behaves different from other browsers when it comes to (the moment of) encoding/decoding urls, pdfobject.js was encoding an already encoded url. I removed the call to encodeUrl() from pdfobject.js, and now inline pdf-viewing works fine in all browsers. (Apparently, encoding is not necessary for colons)
FYI

gr.Maarten

[asmecher]

Hi MMeijer,

Can you clarify what version of OJS you're using? We've made a couple of minor tweaks to the PDFObject embedding in recent releases, but it's entirely possible that there's still an escaping problem, particularly for optional pieces of the puzzle like custom identifiers.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[MMeijer]

Hi Alec,
This is OJS 2.3.8 (latest stable release until very recently). But i upgraded the pdfobject.js to version 1.2 from pdfobject.com.

Regards,
Maarten