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Started by Aye Aye, May 26, 2017, 07:37:27 AM

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Aye Aye


Greetings

Most of my SMF Forums are educational, designed as subject specific online reading rooms. This is because quality reading material, even prescribed texts are neither easily available in Pakistan and the South Asian region. We are trying to fill the gap. Our reading rooms are free, and always will be. We are trying to be of use to serious students and researchers in our region.

What we do is scavenge the Internet for .pdf files of ebooks, and download them. We then convert these .pdf ebook files to .jpegs and post each image as a single post in the topic. The .pdf files are available as complete downloads in a downloads portal we have.

The conversion to .jpeg files is necessary because many among our audience have only smart phones to access the Internet. Many .pdf ebook files are real heavyweights, often more than a 100 MBs., such files do not lend themselves well for download to smart phones, particularly in Pakistan, where the Internet connections are unreliable in the extreme and speeds are abysmally low. There is also the issue of storage space in smart phones.

Right now, the books we upload to our online reading rooms are posted one page at a time, manually. Some of the books consist of thousands of pages.

Is there some way we can schedule bulk posts to our online reading rooms?

Please guide, and thank you in anticipation.

Best regards.


Edited to fix format issue ~ Steve

Kindred

There is not really any good solution. And quite honestly what you are doing is probably not best handled using posts in a forum, instead you should probably look at a different software to host the images if you insist on converting PDF files into individual images per page
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Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Aye Aye



Greetings Kindred,

We have been using SMF software for ages, (since 1.0.7) and in our experience this type of software (message board) serves our purpose best.

To illustrate. Visualize a .pdf ebook consisting of 1284 pages posted at a site. (One is in process right now). Taking in view these facts:

1. Majority of Internet connections in Pakistan allow 1MB or less bandwidth to subscribers. These are shared accounts and functional data rates often fall to a few Kibps, even lesser.

2. Campuses rarely provide Wi-Fi access to students. Where it is available, it is usually limited to the institution's computer labs, the connections are usually quite poor. In many cases students can access stuff online but are not allowed  to download stuff.

2. The file is obviously heavy, would take plenty of time to open.

3. Navigating through chapters and pages is one helluva to-do.

We latched on to our present system accidentally. Our S O P is 15 posts to a page, 15 pages to a topic. So a book over a 1000 pages is split into 6 parts.

Pakistan is singularly poor in libraries too. We are trying to provide access to quality material in the only easy way we know so far, and it works.

We had some problems with the SMF platform until 2.0.12., and we even tried ElkArte for a number of Forums. SMF 2.0.13 happened by just around that time.  We are absolutely at sea so far as software is concerned, but our online experience of over a decade tells us this version is qualitatively different and far improved. We upgraded to 2.0.14 the moment we became aware of its release. so far, our sailing is smooth as can be.

If you do come across some solution that can help speed up our work, kindly do intimate me.

Thank you.



Just to remove anny apprehensions:

1. The material we provide is either out of copyright, or we have permission to display it at our site.

2. Only such material is placed on our download portal, for which we have the requisite permission, or which is not in copyright.

3. Our Disclaimer clearly indicates that if a party possesses copyright to some material and desires that we remove it, we will.

The conversion to .jpg offers certain advantages:

1. We can standardize the size of images.

2. We can enhance quality and readability where required.

3. Downloading such topics would require doing it on single page basis, which is well nigh impossible in the case of books that are voluminous, or multi-volume encyclopedias.


Kindred

You have missed my point, I was not accusing you of doing anything illegal. My main point is that just because something can be done with a system does not mean that it is the best system to be doing it like that. In this case The Forum would seem to be the wrong solution for what you are attempting to do. There are other softwares out there that can do a better job than what you are trying to force the Forum to be configured to do.
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Gluz

For that matter, a book/comic reader would be a better solution, as it only shows one page at a time and you can upload the whole thing at once.

There are some that can read directly from PDF, and there are some others that can be used to show the JPEG images, that way it only load the actual page and possibly the next one or two, so it doesn't use as much bandwidth as the whole thing.

Sir Osis of Liver

You may be able to do what you want with Coppermine.  Haven't gotten around to trying it, but I believe it allows bulk upload of image files to albums, each album being a book.  You could add it to your current forums via a button on main menu.  Shouldn't be too difficult to transfer existing files into albums so all content is in one place.
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

Arantor

So does Levertine Gallery allow bulk uploads to albums.

Aye Aye



Quote from: Kindred on May 28, 2017, 01:09:01 PM
You have missed my point, I was not accusing you of doing anything illegal. My main point is that just because something can be done with a system does not mean that it is the best system to be doing it like that. In this case The Forum would seem to be the wrong solution for what you are attempting to do. There are other softwares out there that can do a better job than what you are trying to force the Forum to be configured to do.


I don't think I missed your point.

The message board platform allows for discussion, which sometimes run into many pages, and are very informative and stimulating.

At our earlier forums we had some topics which ran into 100s of pages, and here I am not talking about books, but simple topics of a few 100 words which sparked the discussion.

In any case, kindly link to some such software that you feel can be of better functionality for our purpose, if you have such links.

Thank you.


Aye Aye



Quote from: Sir Osis of Liver on May 30, 2017, 01:44:33 AM
You may be able to do what you want with Coppermine.  Haven't gotten around to trying it, but I believe it allows bulk upload of image files to albums, each album being a book.  You could add it to your current forums via a button on main menu.  Shouldn't be too difficult to transfer existing files into albums so all content is in one place.



Greetings


We use Coppermine for our images download portal. I don't know why we haven't tried it for the books, but we will now, that you have pointed this out.

Thank you.


Aye Aye



Quote from: Gluz on May 30, 2017, 12:24:37 AM
For that matter, a book/comic reader would be a better solution, as it only shows one page at a time and you can upload the whole thing at once.

There are some that can read directly from PDF, and there are some others that can be used to show the JPEG images, that way it only load the actual page and possibly the next one or two, so it doesn't use as much bandwidth as the whole thing.


Greetings


Thank you you for your suggestion; will definitely try it. Regards.


Kindred

I actually think that a wiki might suit your needs more than a forum... or simple file manager that allows comments on the files
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Sir Osis of Liver

Doesn't look too difficult to modify Coppermine template into a simple reader.  Could use forum as front end, with links in topics to Coppermine albums, each album being a book or publication.  You're already using SMF and Coppermine, just a matter of organizing it differently. 
Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend,
 we were all equal in the end.

                                     - R. Waters

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