Friday, September 27, 2002

PDF --> SWF: Why Bother? FlashGuru picked up this jewel -- a German fellow who's built a PDF-to-SWF conversion utility. The sample website is in German, but you get the idea. Why is this so cool and powerful -- e.g. why wouldn't someone just use Adobe Acrobat? The utility supports Flash 4 and upwards, giving you an electronic document with 95%+ ubiquity, way higher than any version of Acrobat, ensuring a broader set of capable viewers. It's built as a SOAP web service --- pass it a PDF and get a SWF back. I love it! Acrobat has a fixed interface that is out of the context of the host website or application, whereas a SWF file can be dynamically loaded into a more complex piece of content or a custom application. For example, you can't embed and view a PDF in a section of a webpage, but you can easily do this with a SWF. Because you can contain the SWF file inside another Flash application, you can build higher-order navigation and text-reading tools The Flash runtime download is about 375k --- Adobe Acrobat is about 9MB to download As a portable format, Flash 4 compatible SWF runs on pretty much any desktop operating system, and very broadly on Pocket PCs It will be interesting to see how people use this... 9:51:49 PM    comment []