Geek Information Request

[reynardo]

This goes out to the geeks I know - hmmm, that's about 85% of my friends list, isn't it? Anyway... Menu-writing software for PDF CD - ideas needed.

One of the guys at work has a stack of catalogues and manuals as PDF documents and he wants to burn them to a CD. He'd also like to create some sort of a menu system on the CD that works like a hierarchical web page set - For instance, a top page that lists categories, that have clickable links to the sub-pages of the menu, which then have direct links to the catalogue.

For instance, Joe the Biplane expert needs a wing-strut detail, so he throws the CD in his drive. Up comes the menu, he chooses the category "Wings" by clicking on it as it shows on the screen, the from the "wings" menu he chooses "Struts", and up comes the list of four or five catalogues. He finds the entry "Biplane Specialists - Struts" and clicks on it, up comes the PDF of the catalogue.

I thought you could use a relative directory structure written in HTML, but I've been told this isn't possible. What program would you recommend, or could you point me at any web pages that give an idea?

Comments

[thorfinn]

Buh? You sure as heck can use a relative directory structure in HTML and pages and suchlike?

However, is that the Right Tool? Someone's going to have to build a bunch of HTML by hand, which is going to suck...

You could just organise the documents into some kind of appropriate directory tree scheme, and then, well, use your normal file browser on the mounted CD.

Alternately, Search Not Sort?

1 CD isn't very big these days... Copy the CD onto your computer, then search it using Google Desktop?

[trixtah.livejournal.com]

I worked for a legal publishers that published print and CD versions of legislation and commentaries. The text was encoded using SGML and then prepared for printing via Framemaker, and a bunch of custom scripts to create the CDs, which was basically an autorun command that called an ondisk browser to the SGML content.

For the life of me, I don't understand why they think a page that references a directory structure (index page for headings, sub-pages with links to the documents) won't work. It will.

There are some autorun methods outlined here, although I don't think they're strictly necessary. You could open index.html just as easily as popping some little gui interface on the screen.

This tool will even generate an index.html from a directory structure. Obviously, you can create different "index1.htmls" if you specify adding files down the tree, and then do the top level generation of only the index*.htmls.

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

I'd second Thor's idea of making a directory hierarchy of the .pdf files and burning them to CD/DVD, that method would require no programming at all, just a knowledge of how to use the CD burner's software. I also share his concerns that a CD may not be big enough, some .pdf files I use at work are over 100MB, you could only fit eight of those on a CD.