Is there a way to upload a pdf file to Vox, or a workaround to get content displayed in relatively the same format, or should I just give it up?

February 5, 2008 7:36 PM

I have been trying to find a way to upload a pdf file (16 MB - a book with photos and text) to Vox for quite a while and I think I have finally come to the realization that it probably just won't work. Is this a losing battle from which I should bow out gracefully or might there be an alternate route?
posted by missregina to computers & internet (7 comments total)

There's a reasonable chance that they've limited the size of uploads that they'll accept. However, you could check out something like yousendit.com, and simply upload the file there and link to it from Vox.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 7:49 PM on February 5, 2008

Well, yousendit is a trial. But Mediafire.com is not, and it accepts up to 100 MB. There are other services like that, too.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 7:51 PM on February 5, 2008

According to the Vox knowledge base, support for PDFs is planned for the future, but presently it only allows images, audio and video. Took me all of 30 seconds to find too (hint hint).
posted by bizwank at 12:28 AM on February 6, 2008

ImageMagick is a free tool that offers image conversion functionality through the command line. So, if it would be acceptable to upload your book as a set of separate images, you could run something like this:

convert book.pdf book.png

Which would result in the pages in book.pdf being saved to book-n.png, where n is 0 for the first page, 1 for the second page, and so on.

(Note that, for large documents, convert may take some time to run, so be patient.)
posted by esd at 9:10 AM on February 6, 2008

Would Issuu help? Saw it on Download Squad's feed this morning and thought of your question.
posted by littlegreenlights at 2:57 PM on February 6, 2008

Here's Adobe's PDF to HTML converter - I believe that VOX will allow you to use some types of HTML in posts. How much the hamburger is going to look like the cow depends on a lot of variables, so I'd personally just try it and see what happens.
posted by Orb2069 at 6:43 PM on February 6, 2008

Thanks for the suggestions, I appreciate them. I ended up hosting the file somewhere else and just linking to it, probably what I should have done in the first place.
posted by missregina at 5:24 PM on February 10, 2008