Power Book

When creating your pages using PDF2SWF please output to Flash 9 mode, which will create AS3 swf files.

Not doing this will not make your pages unusable, but it may cause problems or exceptions, especially if your pages contains interactive elements or links.

This problem may be related to the XML files loading and the server gzip compression enabled (that causes problems to Flash applications on some browsers).

You can read more info on this problem here: http://blog.jasonnussbaum.com/?p=155

So, the solution is to disable gzip compression on your server.

By default the application includes these characters subsets:

uppercase, lowercase, numerals, punctuation and basic latin

Plus it includes all these single characters:

ÀàÁáÂâÄäÅåÆæߌœÇçÈèÉéÊêËëÐíÍìÎîÏïÓòÑñÒóÖöôùÔúÕûÜüðøØšđč枊ĐČĆŽ©®™°¢£€

Which will cover most of the western common languages. If you need a special chartacters subset (i.e: arabic, japanese, greek, etc…) you can just edit the fla and add/embed this extra subset to the swf.

Doing this is rather easy, but if you do not have Flash or don’t know where to start in doing this please write me an email!

You can modify the page size as you want, just using the the page_proportions option within the node Options in the book.xml.
With this option you can define the proportions of the pages, which means the width/height.

So, for an A4-like page this value should be 0.7. Instead, for a book which width is bigger than its height (so a sort of landscape book) that value should be >1 (i.e.: 1.3).

Even quicker than this, if you set that option to auto the page size will automatically match the first page source file (so if you load a source image for a page, which has square proportions (width=height), the book page will then match this.

It’s quite easy to show a PDF document as a Power Book, but you must convert it, since Flash does not natively support pdf format.

To convert a PDF to a Power Book:

- download pdf2swf, a freeware utility you can find here: http://www.swftools.org
- convert your pdf to a series of SWF files (one swf per page). Output to Flash 9 mode, which will create AS3 swf files. Remove any menu the application may add… you just need plain swf files here
- setup your book using the Quick automatic mode, as described at page 18 of the help manual. This will allow you to import all your converted pages writing just a line in the book XML
- ready to go!

You can also, if you want, create different versions for the normal and the zoomed version of the pages. So from pdf2swf you can for example save your pdf pages first only as low resolution images, and then as a more detailed (with vectors included) SWFs, that will load only if a page is seen in zoom mode (this can greatly reduce the initial loading times).