How to handle PDF documents?

The company site I am working on has a very large assortment of PDFs. I want these to show-up in the sitemap by default. Some of these are very old, simply scans of printed documents. These I will not make searchable (I’ll uncheck searchable in the settings section). But others are more modern with text. Will AjaxSearch search these documents, or is the searchable option something for the search engine bots?

Anyways, with a PDF, I use a blank template, right?

I don’t want these to show in the menu, so I uncheck that option.

I give it a Title, a Long Title, a Description, and then the actual URL location of the PDF document as the URL Alias?

Then I go to settings and I select Published.

It is an actual document on the server so I select web page, not web link, right?

Under Internet Media Type, I select application/pdf. Right?

I guess I uncheck Rich Text.

I keep stats tracking checked.

Searchable is whether it is a scan or a modern text pdf that can be crawled?

Then save...

Is that right?

Or should it be a web link?

Please let me know. Amazon has shipped the MODx book yesterday, but it hasn’t arrived and won’t for a while.

Thanks!
-Doug

you should use weblinks, the URL will be the link to the file. No, they will not be searchable through AjaxSearch (although I believe the author has been looking into this, perhaps I’m out of date). Searching through pdf files is a whole different ballgame; your script has to be able to open and read pdf files which required a special library.

OK, cool. That makes sense.

I think that I’ll have to put a disclaimer on the search results page indicating that the search does not cover the PDF files, then.

How do I get these web links to show-up in the sitemap, though? I want them to, and I know I can exclude them in sitemap 1.0.8, but I’m not (I’ll look again, but I have the default settings) and they aren’t showing up anyway.

Maybe I should ask that and a few other questions in the sitemap thread.

Thanks!
-Doug

I suppose it depends on how many pdf files you need to process and how they are organised. Being lazy I’d abhor the thought of creating hundreds of pdf weblinks.

So an alternative suggestion have you looked at FileDownload http://www.muddydogpaws.com/development/filedownload/features.html from MuddyDogPaws. If all your pdfs are in a couple of directories then this will generate a list of them for downloading.

I’m just testing it out on my own site at the minute - one small example.
www.cherryclan.com/scale7/workbench/sprungbuffers.html
with a download files list in the lefthand side bar. The pdf files are just uploaded using the file manager into the assests/files area on my website.

Regards

Adrian

I don’t think we have a whole bunch. I am guestimating about 24, maybe a few more.

Wayfinder should be able to find them if I put them in a hidden container and ask it to show all the files in there. So the human readable sitemap should be fine.

But the sitemap snippet isn’t showing any weblinks. I wonder if this is because I have set a TV for each document. If the variable is set to 0, that doc is included. Set to a 1, it is not.

But blank templates don’t have any TVs. So the variable doesn’t even exist. I would have thought that then it was defaulted to a 0.

I see how to exclude web links, but not how to include them.

Right now I am just going to upgrade to 1.0.3 and make the site live. We might wind-up using some other sitemap utility, the way this is going.

However, the file download thing looks really, really cool. I think I will check it out. Plus, I’m already a fan of the developer.

Thanks!
-Doug

Weblinks can be given a template now, just for this reason.

Interesting.

That’s cool. I’ll have to use that, eventually. The webmaster wants to hold off on showing PDFs in the sitemap until they all have dynamic links, now.

But I will send this topic page to him so that he knows how to do it, when its required.

Thanks, Susan!

MADE MY DAY:
Quote from: http://www.cherryclan.com/scale7/workbench/sprungbuffers.html

* I used the Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm as cited by Murray Gell-mann:
1. write down the problem;
2. think very hard;
3. write down the answer.