Chapter 30

Document Types for Business

by Jim O'Donnell

• Inso Word for Windows Viewer
  • Downloading and Installing the Inso Word Viewer
  • Using the Inso Word Viewer
• Inso Quick View Plus
  • Downloading and Installing Inso Quick View Plus
  • Quick View Plus Supported Document Types
• Formula One/NET
  • What Is Formula One?
  • Formula One/NET Example Applications
• Portable Document Formats
• Adobe Acrobat
  • Creating Adobe Acrobat Documents
  • Acrobat Reader
  • Tumbleweed Envoy
  • Common Ground Digital Paper
• ActiveX Documents

Content providers with large amounts of information from legacy applications-such as office suite applications like Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, spreadsheets, and other business applications-need to be able to provide access to that information over the Internet and corporate intranets as easily as possible. Methods exist to convert information from many of these formats into HTML or various portable document formats. However, a better solution is to provide the users of the information with the means to directly view legacy documents without conversion being necessary. Products such as Inso Corporation's Word Viewer and Quick View Plus allow this capability.

Inso Word for Windows Viewer

Inso Corporation (see Figure 30.1), at http://www.inso.com/, makes a freeware Word for Windows Viewer that can be used to view Microsoft Word 6.0 and 7.0 documents inline within Netscape Navigator. This capability allows for easy viewing on the Web of documents in the Word format, without converting them to HTML.

Figure 30.1 : Inso Corporation's Word Viewer and other products give access to legacy documents within your Web browser.

While Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 supports many Netscape Navigator plug-ins, it will not work with the Inso Word Viewer. This is because of the way Internet Explorer uses the Windows 95 File Type information to choose helper applications and plug-ins. However, Microsoft produces freeware viewers for Microsoft Word and its other Office applications, and supports their use within Internet Explorer using ActiveX Document technology.

Downloading and Installing the Inso Word Viewer

The latest version of the Inso Word Viewer is available on the CD-ROMs that accompany this book, as well as through the Inso Web site, in the self-extracting file setup32.exe. To install this file, copy it into a temporary directory and execute it to extract the installation files. Then execute the Setup.exe file created to install the Inso Word Viewer, and follow the instructions on the screen.

Using the Inso Word Viewer

After the Inso Word Viewer is installed, using it is automatic. Whenever a local or Web document in Word format is loaded, the Inso Word Viewer is launched to display the document within the Web browser.

There are, however, some limitations of the Inso Word Viewer that need to be kept in mind. Also, it includes some configuration options for viewing and printing displayed documents.

Word Viewer Limitations  There are some definite limitations in how a Microsoft Word document appears when viewed with the Inso Word Viewer. To demonstrate what Inso is, and isn't, capable of supporting when a Microsoft Word document is shown in a Web browser, example documents will be shown first in Word, and then compared to Netscape Navigator with the Inso Word Viewer plug-in.

Figure 30.2 shows a Word document displayed in Microsoft Word. As shown, the document is a technical paper formatted in two columns. The title and authors of the paper are displayed in a banner that spans the two columns.

Figure 30.2 : Microsoft Word documents can be formatted with multiple columns, and can have different numbers of columns within a given page.

Microsoft Word is also capable of importing and displaying graphics and other objects within a document. Figure 30.3 shows a section of the document displaying one figure that is a graphic in GIF format, and another that is an object imported from Microsoft PowerPoint.

Figure 30.3 : Word documents can import and display inline images and objects in many different formats.

Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) files can also be imported into Microsoft Word documents (see Figure 30.4). While these files cannot be displayed onscreen, when printed to a PostScript printer, the EPS files appear. Word is capable of displaying the header information of the EPS files within the graphic placeholder, as shown.

Figure 30.4 : Encapsulated PostScript files are represented with a placeholder, within which Word dis- plays the EPS header information.

If this file is displayed within a Web browser using the Inso Word Viewer, it can display the file, but has some limitations in the types of document formatting it can display. As shown in Figure 30.5, when viewing the top of the document, the header isn't shown and the document is not displayed in two-column format.

Figure 30.5 : The Inso Word Viewer cannot display Word documents in anything other than a one-column format.

As shown in Figure 30.6, the Inso Word Viewer cannot display imported GIF images within a Word format, even though the underlying Web browser can display GIF files. The Inso Word Viewer is capable of importing objects such as PowerPoint objects (see Figure 30.7).

Figure 30.6 : Inline GIF images in Word documents are displayed as placeholders by the Inso Word Viewer.

Figure 30.7 : The Inso Word Viewer can display objects, such as this block diagram created in PowerPoint, within a Word document.

Some other formatting options that are possible within Word documents are not supported in the Inso Word Viewer. As shown in Figure 30.8, Encapsulated PostScript files are not displayed when a Word document is viewed within the Inso Word Viewer. Not only that, but the header information from the EPS file that Microsoft Word displays is missing when the document is viewed within the Inso Word Viewer.

Figure 30.8 : EPS files displayed in the Inso Word Viewer are displayed as gray box placeholders, missing even the header information displayedby Microsoft Word.

A last example of document formatting that can be specified within Microsoft Word, but is not supported by the Inso Word Viewer, is superscripts and subscripts. Figure 30.9 shows a series of formulas which, if correctly formatted, would have extensive use of subscripts.

Figure 30.9 : Subscript and superscript formatting is not supported by the Inso Word Viewer.

In spite of the limitations of the Inso Word Viewer, it provides a good alternative to content providers for making legacy documents available in Word format. This is particularly true for documents that will not suffer from the Inso Word Viewer limitations, such as those that use inline graphics or have extensive equations that make use of subscripts and superscripts.

Run-Time Options of the Word Viewer  When viewing a Word document with the Inso Word Viewer, right-clicking the mouse gives the pop-up menu shown in Figure 30.10. Through this menu, various display and printing configuration options for the Inso Word Viewer are possible.

Figure 30.10 : The Inso Word Viewer's pop-up menu allows the user to control how the Viewer displays and prints Word documents.

Other than the Preview display mode, which shows the document with the margins that will be used in printing it, the Inso Word Viewer has two other viewing modes. In the Draft display mode, the document is displayed using the Inso Word Viewer's draft font (10 point Arial, by default). In the Normal display mode, regular document formatting is used, but it makes use of the entire Web browser window, without any margins, to display the document.

The Options submenu of the Inso Word Viewer pop-up menu (see Figure 30.11) gives access to some of the other configuration options to control Inso Word Viewer printing and display options.

Figure 30.11 : Inso Word Viewer's pop-up menu includes an Options submenu for specifying other con- figuration options.

The Display Options dialog box, brought up by selecting Options, Display, allows the user to specify the default font used for the Draft display mode, and also allows the user to select the character set to use when the Inso Word Viewer displays unknown files (see Figure 30.12). The Print Options dialog box controls the options used when printing a Word document through the Inso Word Viewer, including the font and document margins used, as shown in Figure 30.13.

Figure 30.12 : Inso Word Viewer's Display Options allow the user to specify the Draft display mode font to be used.

Figure 30.13 : The Print Options allow the user to control how Word documents appear when printed by Inso Word Viewer.

The Clipboard Options dialog box (see Figure 30.14) controls the format in which selections made from the Inso Word Viewer and copied to the Clipboard are used. For instance, selections from Word documents that are being viewed with the Inso Word Viewer can be copied to the clipboard in ASCII text format, if you wish to paste them into Notepad, or Word, if you wish to paste them into Word or WordPad. Also, the Clipboard Options dialog box controls which supported graphics formats can be copied to the Clipboard.

Figure 30.14 : Clipboard Options allow selections made from Inso Word Viewer to be copied to the Clipboard in different formats.

Inso Quick View Plus

The Inso Word Viewer is a freeware program from the Inso Corporation that is based on its Quick View Plus commercial program. Quick View Plus is an ideal way for content providers, particularly those within an intranet environment, to make legacy documents available in over 200 formats.

Quick View Plus offers extremely broad support for documents in many different formats; that support is not necessarily deep, however, as not all of the formatting options of the different programs are supported.

Downloading and Installing Inso Quick View Plus

An evaluation version of Quick View Plus is available on this book's CD-ROMs, and also through the Inso Corporation Web site. The self-extracting file, Qvptrw32.exe, should be copied to a temporary directory and executed to extract the install files. Then the Setup.exe file that is created should be executed to install Quick View Plus.

The installation process for Quick View Plus is fairly straightforward. In addition to adding Quick View Plus to the context menu, available through a right-click of a file name in the Windows 95 Explorer, Quick View Plus can install itself as a plug-in to a variety of Web browsers. As shown in Figure 30.15, during the installation process, you are given the option of integrating Quick View Plus into the supported Web browsers that are found on your system.

Figure 30.15 : Quick View Plus, during the installation process, scans your system for supported Web browsers. You can then integrate Quick View Plus into any or all of them.

For Web browsers with which you elect to integrate Quick View Plus, the installation process allows you to elect to integrate it either as a helper application or a plug-in (see Figure 30.16). You will want to install Quick View Plus as a plug-in for any Web browsers that support plug-ins, such as Netscape Navigator-otherwise, you should install it as a helper application.

Figure 30.16 : Quick View Plus can be integrated into Netscape Navigator either as a helper application or a plug-in.

Quick View Plus Supported Document Types

As with the Inso Word Viewer, Quick View Plus can display legacy documents inline in a Web browser, though not always with complete support for the formatting used. The capabilities and limitations of Quick View Plus with Word documents are identical to those of the Inso Word Viewer. Excel documents are supported and can be displayed by Quick View Plus, as shown in Figure 30.17. However, because the column widths cannot be manipulated within Quick View Plus, some spreadsheet cells and columns are difficult to view. Figure 30.18 shows the same spreadsheet shown in Excel. Other formatting options available in Excel, such as colors, borders, and text formatting that spans multiple columns, are not supported in Quick View Plus.

Figure 30.17 : Quick View Plus supports Excel spreadsheets, but with limitations in the types of formatting that can be shown.

Figure 30.18 : Excel supports more formatting options, such as color and borders, which can enhance the appearance of spreadsheet data.

One unique capability of Quick View Plus is that it enables a Web browser to open and view the contents of ZIP and other file archives (see Figure 30.19). By double-clicking the file names that are displayed when an archive is opened within the Web browser, other instances of the Quick View Plus viewer are opened to display the appropriate files (see Figure 30.20).

Figure 30.19 : Quick View Plus has the capability to turn your Web browser into a ZIP (or other archive type) file viewer.

Figure 30.20 : You can access the files included in an archive by double-clicking the file names, which displays the files within Quick View Plus viewers.

The range of document types that are supported by Quick View Plus is very broad. In addition to Word and Excel documents and ZIP file archives, Quick View Plus supports database files (see Figure 30.21) and presentation formats (see Figure 30.22), along with many other file types.

Figure 30.21 : Quick View Plus gives easy access to data- base files that are available on the Web.

Figure 30.22 : Presentations in several different formats can be viewed inline with your Web browser using Quick View Plus.

The full range of file types and versions (where applicable) supported by Quick View Plus are displayed in Tables 30.1 through 30.7. These file types include document, graphics, spreadsheet and database formats, presentations, compressed files and archives, and even executable files.

While somewhat limited in how well it supports some sophisticated document formats, Quick View Plus' broad document format support makes it a good way for a content provider to a corporate intranet to serve legacy documents in many different formats, including some relatively old and obscure formats. Though it's a commercial product, its price is reasonable for the capabilities it provides. At the time of this writing, Quick View Plus can be ordered on the Inso Web site for $49 with Internet delivery, or $59 with mail delivery of floppy disks.

Formula One/NET

Formula One/NET is a product from Visual Components for adding interactive spreadsheets, data grids, and numerical data handling to a Web page (see Figure 30.23). Formula One/NET is a freeware plug-in for compatible Web browsers that is available on the CD-ROMs and through the Visual Components Web site at http://www.visualcomp.com. The self-installing file F1net32s.exe should be copied into a temporary directory and executed to install Formula One/NET-follow the installation instructions given.

Figure 30.23 : Visual Components offers plug-ins and ActiveX Controls for extending the capabilities of applications and Web browsers.

What Is Formula One?

Formula One is Visual Components' full-blown system for adding Excel-compatible spreadsheets to a variety of applications. The subset of this system for working with Web browsers and creating Web page applications is known as Formula One/NET and Formula One/NET Pro. The Pro version, available for purchase through the Visual Components Web site, is necessary for the creation of spreadsheet applications that can be included in Web applications. These applications can then be used and manipulated by a Web browser using the Formula One/NET plug-in.

Formula One/NET Example Applications

A Web document that includes live spreadsheet applications is available when Formula One/NET is installed on your system (also available on the Visual Components Formula One Web site). The following examples are from the Formula One "live" sample, which is located on the Web site at http://www.visualcomp.com/f1net/live.htm and is installed on your system at C:\Vci\F1net\Samples\live.htm. Figure 30.24 shows the first example on this Web page, which includes a blank spreadsheet that can be used within the Web page. As shown, both data and formulas can be placed in the spreadsheet.

Figure 30.24 : Spreadsheets can be embedded in Web pages using Formula One/NET, and can be used and manipulated locally.

Another capability of Formula One/NET spreadsheet applications is that URLs can be embedded within Formula One's interactive tables. In the application shown in Figure 30.25, the user enters a number in the Enter Your Amount to Invest box, and the table is updated with expected yields for the investments shown (note that the spreadsheet shown is an example and the yields are not necessarily from any real data). The buttons on the left side of the table are clickable buttons that can contain embedded URLs that call up information on the funds.

Figure 30.25 : Formula One/NET Web page applications can be created with embedded URLs to allow references to be looked up and followed.

Formula One/NET applications that are accessed and used with Web pages can also be given a form-like interface to make them easier to use. A few more Formula One/NET examples are also shown in this example Web page, each with form-like formatting and a table appearance to solicit input from the user, and perform manipulations of this input directly on the user's machine.

Portable Document Formats

An alternative to serving business application documents in their original form on the Web, or converting them to HTML, is an option somewhere in the middle-using a portable document format. Portable document formats have the benefit of preserving the original formatting and appearance of a document while being viewed by a wider audience (through the availability of freeware viewers on many different platforms) than might have access to the original applications.

The Adobe Acrobat portable document format is the most common one available on the Web. Two other formats are Tumbleweed's Envoy and Common Ground's Digital Paper.

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe, located at http://www.adobe.com/, developed the Acrobat portable document format, which has its roots in Adobe PostScript. Acrobat is not PostScript, though. PostScript files are text, while Acrobat files include blocks of compressed data.

Creating Adobe Acrobat Documents

Creating Adobe Acrobat format files requires a commercial product from Adobe. They have programs for creating PDF files from scratch, as well as converting files from other applications into Acrobat format. Acrobat PDF format files are created using one of Adobe's commercial programs listed in Table 30.8. Information about these products can be found at the Adobe Web site at http://www.adobe.com.

Acrobat documents can be made from any application, and retain the format of the original. This makes them a good way to serve many different document types on the Web that might have richer formatting than is currently possible using HTML. Also, Acrobat documents support such things as embedded QuickTime animations and hypertext links to other Web documents, making them perfectly suited to the Web.

Acrobat Reader

You and your users can display, index, examine, and print Acrobat documents files using the Adobe Acrobat Reader. It can be downloaded from Adobe's World Wide Web site at http://www.adobe.com, and a copy is included on the CD supplied with this book.

The Acrobat Reader lets you pick a number of different zoom views of a PDF document. You can print the current page, a range of pages, or the whole document to any Windows-configured printer-not just PostScript. The Acrobat Reader also displays add-on notes, though you need the Acrobat Exchange program to add them. You can copy text or graphics from PDF documents to the Windows Clipboard, and then paste them into your favorite Windows applications. You can even search for text, and display up to 10 documents at once (see Figure 30.26).

Figure 30.26 : The Acrobat Reader is available as a stand-alone viewer, or in versions that can display Acrobat documents inline in Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Two plug-in modules are included with the Acrobat Reader. The Acrobat Movie plug-in plays QuickTime movies that are imbedded in PDF files. The Weblink plug-in creates a link to your Web browser so that links can be included in Acrobat documents to URLs on the Web. When you click a link, the Acrobat Reader launches your Web browser and connects you to the linked site. Both plug-ins are totally automatic-you don't need to install them.

Tumbleweed Envoy

Envoy, from Tumbleweed (located on the Web at http://www.tumbleweed.com/), is a portable document format designed for the electronic distribution and viewing of documents that have been created using a variety of authoring tools, such as any of the various office suite programs offered by Microsoft and others. Envoy documents retain the formatting of their originals, including formatting and graphics, but are usually much smaller.

Like Adobe Acrobat and the other portable document formats, the Envoy system comes in two parts: commercial authoring tools for creating Envoy documents and free viewer software that you can make available to your users through hypertext links on your Web pages.

Publishing Envoy Documents  Creating Envoy format documents is a very simple matter with either the Envoy with Tumbleweed Extensions software package, or with the Tumble-weed Publisher. With the former, Envoy documents can be created from any application, by printing the document using the included Envoy printer driver. With Tumbleweed Publisher, multiple documents using complex formats such as PostScript can be batch converted into Envoy format.

After the Envoy documents are created, they can be made available on your Web server and served just as any HTML file. They can also be embedded within HTML pages. The Web-master of your Web server should update the MIME types of the server to support Envoy documents, using either of the two MIME types with EVY files:

application/x-envoy
application/envoy

Envoy Viewer  The freeware Envoy Viewer is available for many different Web browsers and platforms, with versions for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Macintosh and for Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and a stand-alone viewer that can be used as a helper application by any Web browser (see Figure 30.27). Because Envoy documents can be generated from any application and retain the formatting and graphics in the original document at a fraction of the size, they provide a good means of document distribution over the Web.

Figure 30.27 : The visual fidelity and small size of Envoy documents make them a good way to present legacy applications on the Web.

Common Ground Digital Paper

Digital Paper is Common Ground Software's term for its portable document format files, which are displayed using the freely-distributable Common Ground Mini Viewer program (see Figure 30.28). The Mini Viewer, available for Mac and Windows, is, by far, the smallest of the three portable document viewers discussed in this chapter: only 243K. It is also the most limited, allowing only navigation, zoom, and printing options. To create Digital Paper documents requires the commercial Common Ground document editing program.

Figure 30.28 : Common Ground's Digital Paper portable document format has been adopted by Apple as the distribution format of some of its online documentation.

Because the Mini Viewer is distributed as a single executable file with no installation process, if you do want to configure it as a helper application, you need to do so manually, setting your Web browsers to recognize files with extension .Dp as MIME type:

application/x-dp

Now the Mini Viewer is launched when such a file is encountered, locally, or on the Web (see Figure 30.29).

Figure 30.29 : The Common Ground Mini Viewer can be configured as a helper application for any Web browser to view Digital Paper format files.

The latest version of the Common Ground Mini Viewer can be downloaded from the CD-ROMs and from Common Ground's Web site at http://www.commonground.com/. There, you can also download an evaluation version of the Common Ground page creation program.

ActiveX Documents

Microsoft's solution to providing business documents on the Web is its ActiveX Document technology. Through ActiveX Documents, Web browsers can display Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and documents from other compatible applications inline, within the Web browser window. This is done by launching the appropriate application (or one of the freeware viewer programs offered by Microsoft) within the Web browser. Netscape Navigator, through the NCompass DocActive and ScriptActive plug-ins, also supports ActiveX Documents.