John Williams (News)
2023-10-26 09:57:08 UTC
I have a collection of single-page music scores that are in the form of a
PDF file with a useless (as in non-linked) index and some extraneous pages.
Unfortunately RISC OS cannot display these pages correctly as most of them
use embedded fonts, but as I am merely using this to process them for use
on a(n Android) tablet, that doesn't matter much.
The first thing I have done is to split them into separate pages using
PDFtools, a front-end to the ported Xpdf utilities by Derek Noonburg, then
renamed the individual files more sensibly. Now at least I can identify
them under a filer!
What I want to do is to create a page to access these files quickly and
effectively.
My first attempt was to create a simple HTML page with links to each page,
all contained within a single directory to avoid path problems.
This "worked" under RISC OS insofar as a selected link would offer a
download of the chosen PDF file. This was because the RISC OS browser
could not natively load the files itself, and was only to be expected.
However, modern browsers on the tablet can display them, which was the
behaviour and context I was aiming for.
However, on transferring this folder to Android, the simple "have them all
in the same directory" approach failed as, for some mysterious reason, the
HTML index file "thought" it was in a remote sub-directory of the folder.
It did not seem practical to remedy this, so I moved on.
Next I thought of my faithful TechWriter. I loaded the index file I had
created into it, and resaved it as a PDF file. I get a page of links just
like in the HTML version.
Examining each, they appear to be names corresponding to a filename
(leafname) as expected: "02 Rattling Bog, The Sloe" does indeed show under
"Misc>Link" as the file "RattlingBog.pdf", but does not, when clicked,
attempt a download like the original HTML did under RO, and similarly did
nothing under Android, not even an error.
My next thought was creating a PDF index page using page numbers, and using
this as the first page of a "reconstituted" PDF multipage document.
But I can't see in either TechWriter or Print PDF how to do this. Both
have extensive internal referencing/bookmarking functions, but I can't see
a simple "go to page n" function. When considering this, remember that I
don't want to reprocess the individual pages under RO, as I might lose
unrecognised embedded content, I just need an effective indexing method for
existing pages that works under Android.
Any ideas or clarifications to offer?
John
PDF file with a useless (as in non-linked) index and some extraneous pages.
Unfortunately RISC OS cannot display these pages correctly as most of them
use embedded fonts, but as I am merely using this to process them for use
on a(n Android) tablet, that doesn't matter much.
The first thing I have done is to split them into separate pages using
PDFtools, a front-end to the ported Xpdf utilities by Derek Noonburg, then
renamed the individual files more sensibly. Now at least I can identify
them under a filer!
What I want to do is to create a page to access these files quickly and
effectively.
My first attempt was to create a simple HTML page with links to each page,
all contained within a single directory to avoid path problems.
This "worked" under RISC OS insofar as a selected link would offer a
download of the chosen PDF file. This was because the RISC OS browser
could not natively load the files itself, and was only to be expected.
However, modern browsers on the tablet can display them, which was the
behaviour and context I was aiming for.
However, on transferring this folder to Android, the simple "have them all
in the same directory" approach failed as, for some mysterious reason, the
HTML index file "thought" it was in a remote sub-directory of the folder.
It did not seem practical to remedy this, so I moved on.
Next I thought of my faithful TechWriter. I loaded the index file I had
created into it, and resaved it as a PDF file. I get a page of links just
like in the HTML version.
Examining each, they appear to be names corresponding to a filename
(leafname) as expected: "02 Rattling Bog, The Sloe" does indeed show under
"Misc>Link" as the file "RattlingBog.pdf", but does not, when clicked,
attempt a download like the original HTML did under RO, and similarly did
nothing under Android, not even an error.
My next thought was creating a PDF index page using page numbers, and using
this as the first page of a "reconstituted" PDF multipage document.
But I can't see in either TechWriter or Print PDF how to do this. Both
have extensive internal referencing/bookmarking functions, but I can't see
a simple "go to page n" function. When considering this, remember that I
don't want to reprocess the individual pages under RO, as I might lose
unrecognised embedded content, I just need an effective indexing method for
existing pages that works under Android.
Any ideas or clarifications to offer?
John