URL to PDF

Any word on this? I would love it if I could use ALL types of URLs with this. Other than the few little issues I have run into, this is exactly what I was looking for!

Currently, WP Lynx only supports HTML/xHTML web pages with embedded JPEG, GIF, and/or PNG images. I suppose other resources could be supported. However, what is expected for each of the other media types would need to be determined.

How do you envision PDF support working, in particular, for the resource linked in your first post of the thread?

I would really just like it to behave like all of the other links…if it could pull a screenshot of the document (whatever is displayed on the screen), then be clickable/open in a new tab, that would be perfect. I don’t mind to add my own text to describe it.

Is that what you mean?

That gives me an idea of what to look into. I can’t guarantee anything at this moment other than this is something I’ll look into for 1.2 or 1.3 (the little bit of PHP based PDF parsing I looked into tells me that finding a good, open source, PDF parsing library will be necessary).

Any news about when this is possible?

I’m still looking into this. For rendering a screen shot of the first page of the PDF, it is doable, but will require ImageMagick on your server. This will likely be added as an ‘experimental’ feature until all the bugs are worked out.

An update on this, looking into it more, adding a screenshot of the first page isn’t a difficult task, as long as your server has Imagick (PECL library) and ImageMagick. Trying to grab useful text from the document is painful. Given how large some PDFs can be, parsing them takes way too long. And even with parsing libraries, it is not obvious what is good data to pull in for a title or description (given few use any standards in this regards).

Heads up, the ‘cyril’ branch of WP Lynx has PDF page 1 preview images (assuming you have Imagick installed). Please feel free to test it. https://github.com/mtekk/WP-Lynx/tree/cyril