Virtual Brochures - Thoughts and How To Help

gord · 22 Mar 2010 at 11:56

What are peoples' opinions of these. Overly engineered PDFs? Nicely presented? Not particularly bothered?

With that in mind, does anyone have any experience with making virtual brochures? Specifically for Free.

There is a tonne of paid services offering to convert my pdf online, and I'm not having much luck. I'm using Adobe Web Premium CS3, so I don't know if there is a plugin I could use to build one.

Any help is much appreciated.

iamtheoneneo · 22 Mar 2010 at 14:06

we had one built for our company work to promote something - it cost a lot and tbh with a bit of time/effort i could have done it at home.
its slow, bulky and hardly anyone looks at it compared to normal text on a page.

SiriusB · 22 Mar 2010 at 16:16

They annoy the hell out of me. If I go to a webpage I expect a webpage, not mess about with a PDF.

They are fine if you wish to view the brochure while offline, otherwise I don't really see the point.

theheyes · 22 Mar 2010 at 16:19

I just Googled "virtual brochure" and tried a few.

Slow, frustrating and gimmicky are just three words that came to mind. If you want opinions mine would be keep it simple and stick with a flat PDF that people know how to use, is quick and easily printable.

rpstewart · 22 Mar 2010 at 17:01

I'd agree with the two comments above. I've had the displeasure of using a few while looking for stuff to do up the bathroom. None have provided any benefit over a plain PDF while at the same time having none of the advantages.

Oh and I don't need it to go "fwttt" every time I turn a page. It's not paper so it shouldn't try and sound like it.

feriso · 23 Mar 2010 at 13:08

I have some from my suppliers and it gets on my nerves as its slow and unessecarily fancy; just a simple PDF file would have been much better.

Sp00n · 23 Mar 2010 at 13:14

They come across as being spam so I don't bother with them really, I'm much more likely (as are clients) to open a PDF document instead.

But I guess it depends on what you are promoting and the user base to which it will be aimed.

Dup · 23 Mar 2010 at 23:22

Try http://www.yudu.com.

I will come clean, I work for them. There is an online free service, just bang up a PDF and do what you like with the URL. It's entirely flash based so quite accessible. It's a basic conversion so you can't brand it your own but compared to some bespoke and paid for simpler versions I wouldn't say it falls too badly in the marketplace seeing as its free. You can print (albeit 15 pages at a time thanks for a limitation with Flash as we're still in version 8), save it for offline viewing and it's hosted worldwide with limelight (same as XBox live etc).

I do agree the page turning thing is gimmicky, the marketplace has only just caught up to us really but I should hope we move it up a notch sooner than later. Ours is a bit less whizz bang that than most though. There are a ton of benefits for the publishers though who end up spending incredible amounts on hard copies of things and then have to transport them around the world, especially in the climate we're in. With a lot of optimisation and utilising newer Flash version features it could be a useful tool IMO.

Anyway, If you need help getting the PDF to spec, my email is in my trust.

gord · 24 Mar 2010 at 10:32

Thanks for the thoughts. I think that's a fairly unanimous vote.

I've signed up to Yudu to try it out. I've submitted a PDF I had already, its a fairly simple A4 job.. does it take some time to process? It's not showing up in my library.

Dup · 24 Mar 2010 at 10:40

It should show up as "processing" in your library. We've got a hand full of servers that share a load of the pages contained and do the conversion part of it. Once done the thumbnail will show up in your library and you'll be able to view it from there.

gord · 24 Mar 2010 at 10:46

Hmm,

Well, I've submitted, but theres nothing in My Library, and resubmitting shows it has put an entry in your DB.

Code:

Internal error: we were unable to process your request due to the following error:

Mysql::Error: Duplicate entry 'toy' for key 2: INSERT INTO `tags` (`name`, `is_category`) VALUES('toy', 0)

My user name is rob.smith.

Dup · 24 Mar 2010 at 11:35

It doesn't look like anything has uploaded at all, there's nothing in the back end that's for sure. Did you click back to resubmit?

It works in all the major browsers so I'm pretty sure it just didn't upload, how big is the file?

If you want, send the PDF to dan.duperouzel (at) yudu.com and I'll see if I can do it from here. Not a great start eh?

gord · 24 Mar 2010 at 11:47

It was just over 1 meg. I was using Firefox and tried both the flash and html uploaders.

Ive just tried IE and its gone through. Although, the file is now 996KB, so I don't know if you have a limit on?

Strange that I was getting a MySQL error that appears to be a duplicate key.

Dup · 24 Mar 2010 at 11:53

No limit really, it'll just time out after so long (30 mins I think) so it all depends on upload speed. 1meg is fine.

I'll submit that error to the dev team, see what they think of it. Certainly haven't seen that one before so thanks for the feedback on that front. I only use Firefox and that's the only browser that's never had issues reported, so congrats on being the odd one out

I see its uploaded with no oddities. I realise it's a niche so up to you what you think of it and if you use it.

gord · 24 Mar 2010 at 12:11

No problemo. It's not really suited for my use, but it looks like a nice service.

As for the technical feedback, you may want to take it with a pinch of salt. This development work laptop has been seriously confused by the myriad of development libraries and browsers installed on it. A lot of Javascript just doesnt work in my IE.. I have to do all my testing on a VM. So being the odd one out doesnt surprise me.