[thelist] show multiple pdf's or other docs

Stuart Young syoung at unitec.ac.nz
Wed Jul 27 00:30:46 CDT 2005


Um, you really need to warn people that these are PDFs in some way

personally I use a PDF icon and the word PDF format beside the link and the file size.
I add the icon using a CSS class, so it is only necessary for the web author to type <a href="" class="PDF">

Jakob Nielsen advocates the use of a gateway page for every report
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030728.html
So people should link to the gateway page rather than directly to the PDF. This is perhaps taking the warning of what sort of content it is to an extreme.

Also there should be a linked way for people to look at the report if they don't have acrobat - personally I have a link for help with PDF on every page and that takes you to a central page with links to download Acrobat, and MS Word viewer and MS Excel viewer and all the other plug-ins the site requires. However, it would be even better if you could provide a link to a service that automatically translates PDFs into webpages, rather than saying "thou must download large and slow plugin".

cheers


--
Dr Stuart Young,       	+64 (0)9-815 4321 x 8656
<syoung at unitec.ac.nz> 	+64 021 183 2846 (mob)
Lecturer, School of Computing and Information Technology,
Unitec New Zealand, Auckland, New Zealand
http://tinyurl.com/4956o
(the official URL for my staffpage is too long and complex)
http://www.pixelandgrain.co.nz/
Web development, graphic design and photography

>>> brian.delaney at mccmh.net 21/07/2005 08:48:01 >>>
We have reports that consists of 10-20 separate pdf files. The new 
direction is to make these reports(pdf's) accessible on our intranet.

Does anybody have a best practice as to how to handle this?
Do you just create a new web page and add links and brief text to each file?

Just curious,

Thanks



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