Navigating through an online article?

MojoMaker

Lads, interesting yet common scenario for browsing an online article I'd appreciate some help with. I have a website on which I want to host several articles scanned from paper publications.

I have each page of each article scanned as a separate .jpg and I have my thumbnails for page one of each article nicely loaded on the website. The problem I'm having is that when I load each page one I am faced with a tricky problem of how to navigate through pages 2,3, 4 etc within the same window.

I am calling each full page .jpg using a standard mm_openBrWindow command which loads a new window (with scrollbars) and allows the viewing of the full size article. I experimented with using text hotspots at the foot of each article "go to page 2", "go to page 3" etc but using Fireworks I can get the hotspot links to show up on the .jpg and this can't navigate through the article.

What am I doing wrong? If I used the slice tool instead I end up with 5 files for each .jpg, none of which are named according to the original .jpg file (in fact the original .jpg file disappears!). This is making article navigation a real pain in the ass.

Any ideas for a simple solution? Can it be done with .jpgs cleanly? Each page is about 1020x1400 so opening a new window with scrollbars is acceptable, any smaller than that and the article would be unreadable. I was thinking originally of having a text link at the foot of each page but using mm_OpenBrWindow only one object can be loaded in the window (in this case the .jpg) and I can't fit in text links. Loading a html page with a .jpg embedded inside means the .jpg will be compressed to the size of the page and will once again be unreadable (too small).

It's driving me mad!!

Serbian

You could do something like what Amazon.com do, where you can leaf through the jpgs of the book pages.

Example of Hitchhikers Guide

MojoMaker

Took a quick look but it's not quite suitable for what I need. The trouble is the scanned .jpg needs to be a min size to be readable (the magazine font is very small!) so I've had to keep the image pretty large. The hitchhikers guide can afford to be small enough to put into individual small pages because the font is big enough to read and there are no large pictures.

Am I barking up the wrong tree with links embedded in hotspots?

Serbian

If the .jpg has to be a certain size to be readable then you don't really have any option but to keep it that size. Depending on how large the pages actually need to be, doing it something like Amazon.com would be an elegant solution.

However, it seems like the page would just be so big that it would fill the screen? Have you got any examples that we could look at to see exactly what kind of scale you are talking about? Would it be possible for you could cut the page into 2 or 3 parts?

When you say links embedded in hotspots, do you mean a thumbnail of the whole page where you can click certain parts to see the relevant bit? If so, that could be a way of doing it alright, as long as you can click something like "See Next Section" instead of having to click back and find the next hotspot.

Seth Brundle

Can you convert it to pdf?

MojoMaker

The original articles came from the publisher in pdf form but were approx 30mb each. Turning the jpg's into pages of a pdf file is not something I'm familiar with. Is it easy enough? I'd need acrobat full version wouldn't I?

Serbia, I'll attach a copy of one of the jpgs so you get an idea but basically yes, they need to be very large so that they can be readable, I have 'em currently at around 1000x1400px and they're nicely legible but below that the small typsetting starts to be come increasingly difficult to read.

My plan was to stick a "Next >>" hotspot at the foot of each page which linked to the next .jpg and called it up in the same window, but when I apply the hotspot in Fireworks it doesn't come out in the final file. When I use a slice instead I get a html file and 5 small .jpgs per original .jpg (image maps?) which is going to get complicated when I'm uploading in the region of 20-30 5-page articles!!

Webmonkey

I doubt its possible to turn a Jpeg into PDF but you say you said the original articles came in PDF?, why not convert them to text and have it just plain old html and use database system then to sort them.

Edit: Well obviously you can change jpg into pdf but it will be of no use really as it will just be an image in the pdf. You could try OCR scanning as text

Serbian

Webmonkey wrote:

You could try OCR scanning as text

I think OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scanning is a bit muck. The quality on the page you posted isn't that great either, so I think OCR would have difficulty getting an accurate result.

It's a tough call though overall. Ideally you would want the content as text so that you can store in a database of some sort, but it seems like you have a lot of images that would need to be converted in some manner (whether that's automatically or manually).

The problem with the JPGs is that they are completely inflexible. They are JPGs and will always remain JPGs. Grouping them all in a PDF mightn't be so bad, though the file size might become prohibitive.

I saw this page which is the Turing Archive where you can zoom in and out of a scanned page. A Java applet is used to provide the functionality. (Obviously, choose a page from the list, agree to terms of service, then the page will be there).

Seth Brundle

Convert the original pdf files into smaller pdfs. This may require you to convert them into rtf and then into pdf again but it is possibly your best bet.
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