According to Marcus Valentine:
> Jakob Nielsen's advice in
>
> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010610.html
>
> is to "Never let your search engines index PDF files" as "usability suffers
> when users are unceremoniously dumped into a PDF file".
>
> This advice is a bit of a body blow as I've finally managed to get htdig to
> index pdfs (this was accomplished by giving up on windows and using linux
> instead).
While I generally agree with just about everything Nielsen says, there
are some of his recommendations that can be too costly to implement,
in terms of either time or resources, for a small-time web site.
The advice about not indexing PDFs really only makes sense if you follow
his earlier advice of making all PDF content available in HTML format as
well. We just don't have the time to do that with all our PDFs.
> So - as a compromise can any one suggest a way of getting htsearch to
> supply the appropriate icon for non-html results returned, to warn the user
> that following the hyperlink will take them to a non-html document?
That's a reasonable compromise, which I implemented on the SCRC web site.
Try a search for "baclofen" on our web site, and you'll see how I tag
PDFs. Clicking on the little PDF logo will take you to an information
page describing what to do with them.
I use the standard builtin-long and builtin-short templates for most
things, so I didn't bother changing template_map, but here's what I
added to my htdig.conf file:
template_patterns: .pdf /etc/htdig/templ_${template_name}_pdf.html
and my added template files are...
::::::::::::::
/etc/htdig/templ_builtin-long_pdf.html
::::::::::::::
<dl><dt><strong><a href="$&(URL)">$&(TITLE)</a></strong>$(STARSLEFT)
</dt><dd>$(EXCERPT)<br>
<i><a href="$&(URL)">$&(URL)</a></i>
<font size="-1">$(MODIFIED), $(SIZEK) KB PDF
<a href="/doc/pdf.html"><img src="/images/button-pdf.gif" width="14" height="12"
border="0" alt="PDF"></a>
</font>
</dd></dl>
::::::::::::::
/etc/htdig/templ_builtin-short_pdf.html
::::::::::::::
$(STARSRIGHT) <strong><a href="$&(URL)">$&(TITLE)</a></strong> <a
href="/doc/pdf.html"><img src="/images/button-pdf.gif" width="14" height="12"
border="0" alt="PDF"></a><br>
Also have a look at http://www.htdig.org/hts_selectors.html#template_patterns
and http://www.htdig.org/attrs.html#template_patterns .
--
Gilles R. Detillieux E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Spinal Cord Research Centre WWW: http://www.scrc.umanitoba.ca/
Dept. Physiology, U. of Manitoba Phone: (204)789-3766
Winnipeg, MB R3E 3J7 (Canada) Fax: (204)789-3930
_______________________________________________
htdig-general mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To unsubscribe, send a message to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with a
subject of unsubscribe
FAQ: http://htdig.sourceforge.net/FAQ.html
