PDFs displayed in Player!

[Sivakatirswami]

We have done a lot of work and research into this area. Like Dan  
says: we love and  use PDF's (Hinduism Today Digital Edition is build  
on launch PDF into Acrobat reader)

Unfortunately, relying on PDF as a core for delivery is fraught with  
issues. e.g. if you think that Great Adobe, has provided flawless  
functionality in the much touted interactive media delivery system  
from inside PDF's you will be sadly disappointed, it fails as often  
as it works on any number of machines both on the mac and windows  
side. Error feedback is remarkably "lame" e.g. if the user is not  
connected to the internet and so cannot view external media from a  
web server, Adobe just throws a generic error, making you the  
producer, look like you did something wrong... there's more, but I  
will save it....

We use Dan Schafers little script to call cmd.exe on Windows to  
launch PDF's into Acrobat reader, but I'm getting complaints that on  
some windows systems, even this does not work. And debugging this  
from a "distance." Is very difficult to say the least. And, the  
Acrobat work group at Adobe is very much focused on the windows side  
and mac implementation of PDF from within Acrobat reader itself is  
very sluggish by comparison.

We are at the mercy of Titans in a  war where greed rules, and "let's  
get together and make things compatible" is a blacklisted policy.  
It's amazing to me that Rev does as well as it does do with this  
cross platform business. if you are really serious about this you  
need to spend some big bucks and implement the Apple SDK suite for  
PDF on the Mac (very rich options) and 3rd party SDK's for PDF on  
Windows. (There's a great company in California build on source code  
from Asia where this is big stuff)  you won't get in an out for under  
$50,000.00 to get all the functionality you might want.

And, in a similar vein, after months of research on video delivery  
and codecs and cross-platform delivery and talking to consultants...  
we all came to the same conclusion: you really only have one option  
Quicktime, and you have to live within those parameters. of course if  
you have $$$$ you can try going the  Macromedia way with the Flash  
codec, then that is a path fraught with boulders and you need really,  
really deep pockets.

Scott Raney made the right move in adopting QT years ago. And  
expecting QT to be Acrobat is just a wrong expectation... rather look  
at it  like this: Apple is an innovative company that has no problem  
engineering for compatibility, MS doesn't look at  life like that at  
all, that's not Rev's problem.


Sivakatirswami




On Jun 22, 2006, at 12:46 PM, Ton Kuypers wrote:

>  It would be very nice to have a preview of imported PDF files, but  
> for now I just leave it as a feature request for a next version  
> when RR handles PDF internally, without relying on Quicktime...