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rlgleason51

Handling PDF documents

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I am scanning old documents into PDF with the intention of adding as exhibits and started wondering....

 

Is this a good idea? what would the shortcomings be? what other options are there that I should be considering?

 

Thanks

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Bob,

 

Well, it's hard to say since you don't say why you are doing this, but I can't think of a way in which this is a good approach.

 

If your intent is to make then readily available for reference by viewing them from TMG, I think it's a poor idea. First, it takes too many clicks to find an exhibit if you have very many of them. Then TMG itself can't display PDFs, but rather calls Windows to find an application to do so, just as would happen if you accessed them yourself from Windows Explorer. Even if you used an image format instead of a PDF the viewer in TMG is not very good for examining documents, in my view.

 

If the purpose is to organize them for finding later, I think it's much better to organize them directly in a file system using Windows folders.

 

If your intent is to have them display in TMG reports, it's definitely a bad idea because PDFs can't be included in TMG reports. Even if you use an image format instead of PDFs I don't see how it can work. Most images would have to be full page sized to be viewable, so more than a few of them would totally overrun a report.

 

If your intent is to display them in a website created with Second Site, you are on the right path but PDF is a poor format for web viewing. Use of JPG, GIF, or PNG are all better choices for web viewing.

 

If you are member of the Arlington RUG, you might look at my article on this topic in the latest newsletter for more details.

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Terry

 

Thanks for your helpful reply. My primary goal was to preserve the documents, since they were found in my Mother's files in pretty ragged condition. My secondary goal was to link them to my ancestors. It is this goal that appears to be a bad idea. I'll just create a source for them and not include them as exhibits.

 

I am a member of RUG and I have read your article, which I found informative. It lead me to a question which I will post in another topic.

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Also keep in mind that a PDF is a document, not an image format. TMG cannot display PDF files where it displays image files such as in reports.

 

Second Site can include PDFs and they are displayed in a site by whatever PDF reader is tied to the browser that a person is using to browse the site.

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I have some PDF documents which I attached as exhibits in TMG. When I try to view any of them from the exhibit log, nothing happens. I have Adobe installed.

 

The PDFs are each 2 or 3 pages from a magazine article about my ancestor and his descendants. Each PDF is attached to the particular person that the portion of the article is referring to. The idea was to have easy access to the information in the article when I am looking at that person in TMG.

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TMG does not view any sort of file used as an Exhibit other than images and plain text files. For all others it simply asks Windows to find an application that will open the file. It would seem that on your system Windows does not have an association for PDF files.

 

Have you tried opening the PDF by double-clicking on them in Windows Explorer? I expect you will find that doesn't work. If so, you need to follows the prompts to associate them with Adobe Reader.

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Thanks for the quick reply, Terry.

 

I found the problem. My default PDF reader was the Windows 8 Reader. TMG does not seem to be able to work with that reader. When I made Adobe the default reader, everything worked fine.

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I had tested this earlier. PDF viewing in the Exhibit Log does not work under Windows 10 if the .PDF file association is set to Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge or Reader. The file association must be set to some third party PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader.

 

TMG is failing to view the PFD files with the file association set to a app which normally will display the files. TMG apparently can't open Windows 10 apps since they are not .EXEs. This is probably something that could have been fixed. Internet Explorer fails because it invokes Reader when Reader is installed. There are likely cases where IE works.

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