Doug,
2. It IS possible to determine the path to a file such as a PDF
uploaded directly into a course site (as opposed to authoring space)
and from there to create your own HTML page with links directly to
the PDFs to accomplish the same as in approach 1 but with full
control over the look of the page linking to them. The downside with
this approach is that so far the only way I've found to find the
path to the PDFs uploaded to the course is to upload them to a
hidden folder then click on each and look at the code for the page
they are embedded in to find the path direct to the file itself.
In the current LON-CAPA 2.10.1 you can upload an HTML page directly to
a course, and if the original page contains link tags, pointing at
relative links, you will be prompted to upload files for each of those
links, as long as you checked the "Upload embedded images/multimedia
files if HTML file" checkbox when uploading the file.
Those files are stored in a sub-directory tied to the particular
uploaded content, and do not need to be placed in hidden folders etc.
These dependencies are stored internally in LON-CAPA with the course,
so will be migrated automatically to a new course, should you create
one by cloning the old course.
A deficiency in 2.10 was the fact that the "edit" functionality
provided did not allow files which were dependencies (i.e., relative
links, images etc.) to be replaced, so to make changes you needed to
remove the uploaded HTML using the Course Editor, and then upload a
new one.
Anyway, that is remedied in the forthcoming LON-CAPA 2.11.0, which
supports upload/replacement of dependencies in HTML files you upload
directly to a course.
So, in 2.11.0 you could include relative links (e.g., to PDF files) in
your HTML page, and then use the "Manage Dependencies" button to
replace those files. You will also be able to edit the HTML file
(e.g., to add new relative links), and then use "Manage Dependencies"
to upload any files specified in relative links and/or the src
attribute in img tags, which are currently not uploaded.
Of course, uploading content directly to a course in this way, does
circumvent publication to the shared content repository, thereby
making reuse of your content in other contexts less straightforward.
Stuart Raeburn
LON-CAPA Academic Consortium
Quoting "Mills, Douglas G" <dmi...@illinois.edu>:
Hey All,
I'm finally getting around to trying to address the problem iPad and
other iOS users have accessing PDFs embedded in a frame on a web
page -- so for example any PDF uploaded by an instructor into a
folder in Lon-Capa. You've probably come across this -- the iOS
Safari somehow does not allot the correct size frame to the PDF (I
think is the root issue), 1-finger scrolling moves the browser
around and 2-finger scrolling scrolls the page up and down -- but
NOT the PDF inside the frame, so all the student can see of a pdf is
what appears in the frame when it initially loads.
A couple of solutions I've come up with to address this:
1. Use a Composite Page rather than a folder -- uploading PDFs to a
Composite Page provides links directly to the PDF so that it opens
in the full browser window rather than being embedded in the
Lon-Capa framework and from there iOS users can scroll up and down
or if they prefer open it in a PDF app on their device for
annotation. The downside of this approach is that the Composite
Page automatically adds a lot of verbiage and warnings to a download
file such as the PDF so, for example, when adding a PDF entitled
"Lecture 01" to the Composite page, I end up with all this:
[cid:0ACFF5EA-5B62-444F-913F-7653280A7D7F]
2. It IS possible to determine the path to a file such as a PDF
uploaded directly into a course site (as opposed to authoring space)
and from there to create your own HTML page with links directly to
the PDFs to accomplish the same as in approach 1 but with full
control over the look of the page linking to them. The downside with
this approach is that so far the only way I've found to find the
path to the PDFs uploaded to the course is to upload them to a
hidden folder then click on each and look at the code for the page
they are embedded in to find the path direct to the file itself.
That's not a huge deal but ideally I'm looking for a solution the
instructors themselves will be responsible for once they learn how
to do it, and this seems like too much overhead for many of them.
So I'm looking for feedback and suggestions on either or both of
these approaches, OR if you've solved this problem in some other
way, I'll be happy to hear about that as well. Again, I'm looking
for ways that instructors developing their course sites can make
their PDFs available to students in such a way that they can access
them and even make optimum use of them on mobile devices (should
note here that while I know this is an issue on iOS devices, I've
tested also on a Motorola Zoom I have access to and the pdf does not
open in the Lon-Capa frame at all, but does work as a Composite
page. I'm sure the version of Android on the Zoom is outdated, but
do not have access to newer Android devices right now for testing).
Thanks as always for input and guidance!
Doug
Douglas Mills
Director of Instructional Technologies
Department of Chemistry
University of Illinois
dmi...@illinois.edu<mailto:dmi...@illinois.edu>
(217) 244-5739
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