Need Suggestions for File Format for Deploying Content to Web

By kat on 9 Feb 2004 at 21:29 UTC

Has anyone tackled the issue of the best (or better) file format to use to deploy content on a web site? Much of the content at my firm is done using the Microsoft Office suite. This is great for the content creators who have MS-Word or MS-Visio on their desktops. However, I do not want to require clients to have MS-Word or MS-Visio in order to be able to successfully view the content on line.

Any anyone had any success in transforming documents once they are uploaded to Drupal to another format, say PDF or TIFF??? In this way, both audience groups have their requirements met: one file format for content maintenance, and one file format strictly for viewing. I would like to accomplish this file format transformation automatically on upload, in order to prevent content creators from having to maintain multiple versions of their content. And, of course, it would be great if this type of functionality was not expensive to acquire.

Thanks for any suggestions or advice one may have.

Comments

PDF

killes@www.drop.org commented 10 February 2004 at 01:22

PDF is the way to go. it is a somewhat open standard and available for many, many platforms. TIFF is a image format which is not suitable to transport text.

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PDF and TIFF

kat commented 10 February 2004 at 02:02

Killes - Thank you for your reply.

Yes, PDF does seem to dominate the market today. I sometimes have to remind myself that the Portable Document Format **is** a published standard that Adobe makes available to any developer who want to write software to support it. Do you know of anyone who is converting documents on-the-fly to PDF when uploaded to Drupal?

I suggested TIFF as a result of research that pointed out that many enterprise content management systems use a TIFF image of the content to provide a generic display upon publication of the content to the web. Of course, the user cannot do much with the TIFF image besides view it. But, having both formats could allow one to provide the user the option to view the document or download the document -- or both.

Kat---

I've written a small pdfview

killes@www.drop.org commented 10 February 2004 at 02:15

I've written a small pdfview module that converts Drupal nodes to PDF. But I did not upgrade it to 4.3 as the underlying library leaves several feature to be desired. I've found another library that I could use, but don't have the time to look into this right now.

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