Why Alfresco use swf to preview the document?

[smilehahohi]

why alfresco use swf to preview the document? Recent I have made a customization on the share, which allow the user to preview the document by PDF, it's very clear, and the performance is good, due to the document only need to be transfomed into PDF, don't need to be transformed into swf anymore.

[afaust]

Hello,

I think the "Why" can be answered based on the (relative) prevalence of Flash on the client side and the reduced transfer size of SWF compared to PDF (due to lower quality required for previewing) - at least when the preview component was first added to the product.
Have you based your customization on the existing previewer functionality (e.g. its provided extension points) or have you added a special custom component?

Regards
Axel

[smilehahohi]

Hello,

I think the "Why" can be answered based on the (relative) prevalence of Flash on the client side and the reduced transfer size of SWF compared to PDF (due to lower quality required for previewing) - at least when the preview component was first added to the product.
Have you based your customization on the existing previewer functionality (e.g. its provided extension points) or have you added a special custom component?

Regards
Axel

Hi,

I think Alfresco is mainly used in enterprise for internal using, so the transferring is not a problem, but I think there will be a security issue if we use PDF to preview the doc, it means the user who can preview the doc can also download the doc, because the PDF will be download to browser for preview, but I think it's a not a big problem if alfresco is only used for enterprise internal.

I build this functinality based on the existed thumbnail service and transfer service, I also used a js PDF previewer. You can see the previewer as below:

[img]http://ecm-kit.15604.n6.nabble.com/file/n5000912/PDFPreview.png;cid=1340853270381-168[/img]

Regards,
Smilehahohi

[smilehahohi]

This solution will fix the notorious "preview blur" issue, also there is a navigation bar for user to navigate the content. :lol: