Questions[pdf](server)

This is a dummy question. I have to give public access to PDFs, let's say 8 MB / file. It seems to me that nginx will serve any kind of files, as long as they are static. But someone tells me nginx isn't suited for this.

Can you provide me some documentation to prove me/him wrong ?

I am looking for a system to prepare internal technical documents that has the following basic features:

1. source files should be human-readable text files, so they play well with revision control
2. supports basic formatting (e.g. images, tables, boldface, etc.)
3. works with both English and Chinese characters
4. outputs to PDF

I could, for example, users to write HTML pages and print the pages to PDF, but this seems complicated and error-prone, and HTML is only barely "human-readable". LaTeX is also very complicated, and it has a lot of dependencies that might make it hard to process documents that are several years old.

Does anyone have any better suggestions?

When looking in our Apache access log, when users are downloading PDF files from our server, the following often (but not always) happens. The URL is first requested and delivered with a status 200 (ok) and the full reply size, then immediately following are numerous requests for the same URL from the same client, with a smaller reply size and a 206 (partial reply) status code.

In other words, some clients first download the entire PDF successfully, then appear to download numerous "chunks" of the file again.

Why are we seeing this?

I'm looking for a solution in Ubuntu that indexes PDF (and ps?) files for searching later.

The criteria would be:

1. Compatibility: Often extracting text varies, depending on what software was used to create the PDF. Some PDFs can also be "locked", which I guess one should respect.
2. Search functionality: wildcards, regex's, "fuzzy" matching.
3. Speed of search

In my case I want to index a folder of academic journal articles, hence the requirement that it works consistently regardless of what software created the PDF. I'm already using a reference manager so would rather not replace that.

For example: A good front-end to Beagle, and a plugin that allows it to index PDFs would be perfect.

With the latest javascript vulnerabilities in Adobe reader and bloat it has aquired over the years, I've been thinking of moving the network I'm in charge of to a different product for PDF reading on Windows.

The ideal PDF reader should be something that is:

• Small in size (Adobe reader is more than 200MB these days after installation).
• As secure by default as possible (For example, javascript disabled by default).
• Nice looking and easy to use interface.
• Not bloated with features (I just want to read PDFs, that's it).
• Does not install any toolbars/unwanted add ons/spyware.
• Does not display any ads while viewing PDFs.
• Preferably Open Source. (this pretty much ensures no ads).
• Full Unicode support.

Idealy , something like evince from gnome, will be the best option, but unfortunately that's not available on Windows.

Foxit is an option, as it is small, and has a nice interface. But it still has javascript enabled by default which might lead to vulnerabilities - and it installs a toolbar , and displays ads while reading PDFs which is distracting.

There is a site dedicated to Open Source PDF readers, pdfreaders.org, however, the Windows pdf readers each have their problems, mostly the interface is not as convenient (as evince, adobe or foxit).

Here's a list of all PDF software from WikiPedia. There's a "Viewers" section for each OS.

What Windows PDF reader would you recommend ?