Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2019 August 14

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August 14

Safe?

Is this website safe to use? I'm trying to convert a pdf file on my computer to html so I can put it on a webpage. --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 15:18, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

Do you actually need to convert? I've just dropped a PDF in my DOCROOT and it was immediately readable. Web server: Apache/2.4.6, browser: Firefox Quantum 60.8.0esr. Regards, Martin of Sheffield (talk) 17:10, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

There are lots of website safety checkers (just Google website safe checker). Norton Safe Web found no issues with the site you mention.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 07:46, 15 August 2019 (UTC)

Upload pdf

I have a pdf stored as a file on my computer, and I would like to display it on a github page. How do I do this? Also note, I'm not that tech savvy so try to dumb it down for me. Thanks. --Puzzledvegetable^{Is it teatime already?} 21:44, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

If not very large, one option would be to do a screen grab (using the Print Screen button on keyboard, possibly with SHIFT, CTRL, or ALT), paste it (Edit + Paste ?) and trim the image with something like MS Paint, Save As a JPG image file, GIF, etc. (but not as a bitmap), and display that using HTML (presumably GitHub can help you upload an image and display it on the page). Exactly how large of an image you can grab depends on the screen resolution you can display. This could also be done if there are convenient page-sized chunks to break it into. Disadvantages include the difficulty in making modifications (you would need to modify the PDF and repeat the process), larger disk space used than text, and inability to make it sharper by zooming in beyond 100%. One possible advantage is that it makes it harder for others to copy and then modify the data.

Note that PDFs include both text and images, so the data you want may be in either form initially. If it is stored as text internally, it may also be possible to extract that text, while if it is already an image, then converting it to text would require OCR.

It would help if you could describe the contents you want to grab from the PDF. Try zooming way in to tell if it is actual text, or an image of text. (If it gets sharper with every further zoom, then it is actual text.) Also, if you can highlight the text a character at a time with mouse, then it is actual text and you may be able to just cut and paste it directly to any text editor, but likely losing any formatting in the process. SinisterLefty (talk) 00:22, 15 August 2019 (UTC)