[Mediawiki-l] Allow PDF uploads?

Tue Sep 27 15:45:26 UTC 2005

Rob Church wrote:
> PDF is a document, not an image format. As far as I know, there is
> also no server-side control which would allow display of PDF files, so
> I have a nasty feeling the answer to both your questions is, "no".

PDF is a page description format, a format for stuff that is 
intended to be represented as a printed page.  As such it can also 
be converted to a (high resolution) bitmap image.  I guess you can 
combine xpdf or ghostscript into a 300 dpi PDF-to-PNG converter on 
the server side, and then to use MediaWiki's scaling function to 
present this image in any reduced scale you wish.  That would be 
an interesting extension.  But I don't think it has been done yet.

One interesting aspect of PDF is that one file can contain many 
pages.  So how do you select which of the contained pages to 
extract and reproduce as an image?  You can make an entire gallery 
of thumbnails out of one PDF file.  For runtime performance 
reasons, you might want to start the page extraction in the 
background as soon as the PDF file is uploaded.  Or maybe not.

TIFF is another container format, where one file can contain 
multiple pages, so the same selection/gallery problems would arise 
there.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se