linuxgurumaniac

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Hello,
A friend of mine who works at a charitable organisation was asking to help him in a small task.
He have two type of users, one type that have full access to a file and the other who can just
view the file. Now to make it easier for the viewer who don't always have access to M$ office
suite like word or excel and who cant afford it he was considering to let the server convert
these file for them to pdf on the fly, without deleting or replacing the original file.
And the commercial version which he found are very expensive.

Now I was considering have Linux box who have a cups with the virtual PDF-printer installed
but the thing is he was looking for a web interface solution where the viewer don't have
to install any client software on his pc. He should see a list of files when he click on one
it will open in PDF format after it have been converted silently in the server.

Please any suggestion would very great-full.

Thank you in advance.
Edit/Delete Message

kstan

what kind of file you have in the server? Convert document to PDF on the fly is a bit tricky.

linuxgurumaniac

well all kind of files from document to images to ...
I know there are a lot of converters over there but
what I'm looking for is how to make it silent behind
the scene.

kstan

If there is not standard it is hard for covert it, why don't ask the originator upload pdf file directly? Tailor made a solution is time/resource consuming

linuxgurumaniac

ahh well we do want to preserve space, and as I stated in my first post
that pdf conversion part will only happen to the user who only have read
access and to avoid to install a lot of programs.

I did find a couple of servers that do what I'm locking for but the
charity can't afford to buy licences.

1 - http://www.qoppa.com/pas/pasindex.html
2 - http://rainbowpdf.com/productServer.php

SaintDanBert

Most images, jpg, png, etc, are visible directly in most modern browsers.
If you have images that are not visible directly, look for filters for those formats to convert from whatever you have to a web friendly format. Also consider using a "thumbnail generator". As you know, a thumbnail is a compact edition of an image that is very web friendly.

The linux world is full of utilities with names like mumble2pdf. There are also numerous filters with names like mumble2ps. Where "mumble" might be "text", "ps" (postscript), "doc", "html", "man" and so on. You will need someone to create scripts that accomplish the command line conversions for your server.

Conversion on demand sounds like a good idea at first, but I would discourage that approach. It is too easy to store files in a compressed archive that you uncompress on demand. Thing about a very large DOC file -- a dissertation or other white-paper. Do you really what your site visitor to wait while it converts before they can read it.

• Accept documents uploads in whichever formats make sense
• Convert on receipt or batch them up,
• store as PDF to a separate folder
• compress the folder contents to save space

kstan

In above situation, it is consume your money. Still resource consuming. Lets try to narrow down the situation so that we can find more specific solution:

• All picture open natively in all kind of OS/browser, so we don't need to convert it into PDF
• Word, Excel, Powerpoint is most common document format which we need to convert it to PDF, we shall focus it
• ODF format maybe another kind of format we need to concern, do you think we need to spend time for convert it to PDF?
• What others format you concern?

After we narrow down the possibility, then we can start assembly the lego from the scratch.

linuxgurumaniac

First thanks for you support.
Secondly we do need to also convert the images so we can limit the possibility to the user to edit this is image.
these are some of the format I'm targeting and wish it can be converted:
ACD – AutoCAD
DGN – Micro station Application
GIF – GIF Images
IGR – Intergraph format
JPG – JPG Images
MPP – MS Project