PDF image search

[bigcheeseburger]

Hello

Currently about to make a website for the ministry of defence, They have a strange requirement

I need to do a search function to find PDF images and display a list of results.
The selected PDF from the results can then be opened withiin a frame.

I'm a bit confused on how to do this so far, Do i make the search look at a database of keywords / stock numbers and show the results in a hyperlink?

Would it be possible to show thumbnails of the PDF's inside a frame?

Cheers
J

 

[toastyman]

Because what a PDF file contains is essentially instructions to the printer -- that is, the visual representation of the document, I would have thought you can write a program which opens each PDF when it is uploaded or edited, and creates a thumbnail of it and saves it into a directory. Then, when your user searches by keyword or stockcode etc, the database finds the right document(s) and returns the filenames for the thumbnails. Then you just output the thumbnail on the page.

The hard part is going to be getting a snapshot of the PDF. What scripting language are you using?