Installing SwiftView from your website

Before your users can view or print your PCL documents, HPGL drawings or TIFF files, they must be able to use the SwiftView Netscape Plug-in or the SwiftView Internet Explorer ActiveX.  Fortunately, you can set up your website so essentially nothing is required of the user.  "Essentially nothing" means that the user's browser may be set to display security messages during the process.  There is nothing that can be done about those messages except to assure the user that the process is, in fact, safe.  Our installs use the established digital certificate process and all downloads are regularly virus scanned.

The most normal installation approach is the "one click install" and that is shown in detail below. 

How to make a one button IE and Mozilla/Firefox installation using HTML and JavaScript

It is easy to make a one-button install, which will install SwiftView on either Mozilla/FF or IE, automatically determining which browser is being used. 

Show me how

Sending your users to swiftview.com for installation
The page http://www.swiftview.com/dload/euinstall.htm is designed for end users who need to install SwiftView. This page is best used by small companies or one-time rollouts. Ongoing installations or those involving large numbers of users should be done by creating your own installation website as shown in the above example. Some reasons for doing so are:

• You can choose the exact installer you want. We have many installers, but only a few of them are available from the end user install page. It is highly recommended that you consult technical support to select the best installers for your particular needs.
• You decide when to roll out the next version of SwiftView. If your users install from our end user install page, when there is a newer version, they get it immediately.
• You control installer availability. Although the swiftview.com site is extremely reliable, inclement Internet "weather" or other events could make our site inaccessible. If you're hosting the installers, the installers are always available when it matters, which is when your site is available!

Controlling SwiftView's appearance from your website

Customize SwiftView's appearance for all website users.  Just place the ICS file npsview.ics at the root of your website. Here is an example ICS file  with the file name changed to a text file so that it can be viewed here.  This is the trivial case, customizing the appearance of SwiftView identically for all users visiting your website.

Customize SwiftView for a specific file.  Simply create an ICS file containing the customizations.  In your HTML page, a hyperlink would reference this ICS file which in turn references the actual document to be viewed.   Here is an example which places the SwiftView toolbar along the top edge of the window.   In this example, we know the document orientation is landscape so to display as much of the document as possible we place the toolbar along the top.  View the ICS source file here.

Demo HTML user interface customizing SwiftView.  Just click to see SwiftView change.  Many more things are possible.

Adding markups to the document or drawing

Overview of markup ICS commands on your website.  
  
Cool HTML user interface adding "Yellow Sticky Notes" to documents.  Again, many more things are possible.

Coming soon...

Generalized markup which can be customized to every user.   We will include both ASP and PHP3 examples.

Embedding documents or drawings in your HTML pages

How to embed SwiftView using EMBED or OBJECT tags.  This is superior to Frames in many ways and provides most of the same capabilties.

How to embed SwiftView using Frames.  This lets you keep your company header and navigation bar in view. 

Table of contents using fixed page numbers   Hyperlinks in the sidebar of this page cause the document to open to a particular page number.  This model is better for static documents that do not change, because if the page numbers change, the hyperlinks will be incorrect until they are updated.

Table of contents which searches for chapter names   The hyperlinks in this sidebar search for the names of the chapters. Since the search does not rely on page number, it is excellent for works in progress. As long as the chapter titles are constant, the page numbers will always be correct.  This application works well for indexing formatted reports which always have the same headings.

Web server scripting - ASP and PHP3

Active Server Pages (ASP) for MS Internet Information Server (IIS) and PHP3 on Apache, Netscape and IIS provide an excellent way of "gluing together" the various operations of your site.  They embed VisualBasic-like and C-like code, respectively, inside the HTML on your site.  That code is processed by your web server and what comes out is 100% HTML.  There need be no client components (i.e. you may output strictly HTML) but it is often useful to return Javascript to the browser client as well.  The result is a powerful, procedural method of creating HTML from data in a database, handling server based files, gluing various HTML and Javascript components together, and controlling SwiftView.

This is a RedHat Linux, Apache, PHP3 site but we will eventually have up an MS NT IIS ASP site as well running some of our examples.  We use both PHP3 and ASP extensively internally for various purposes, including customer tracking databases.

One excellent use of server scripting is with SwiftView. SwiftView is vastly more flexible than any other Netscape Plug-in or Internet Explorer ActiveX.  That's easy to say, but what we really provide?  Here are a few examples that can't be done, so far as we know, with any other product:

• Control which SwiftView buttons are displayed, what they say and what they do.
• Control default SwiftView settings, like PCL paper size and HPGL pen colors.
• Add markup text like "PRELIMINARY" to any drawing or document.
• Add hypertext links into the documents or drawings themselves.
• Add "sticky notes" to documents or drawings