On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Frank Wiles wrote:

I seriously doubt you'll find anything like this online as most people wouldn't want to use a PDF as a data source for something like this.

Hi Frank, thanks for your input. You are absolutely correct that most people do not build an e-commerce site like this. Certainly the "traditional" build-from-database method has proven its value, and it has certain advantages. One advantage of this PDF method, however, is that it utilizes the company's existing investment in their print catalog by using it as the source of the online presentation of merchandise. It also groups related items together automatically, so that you don't have to say "People who bought this also bought that" and have a program build the relations for you.

Everybody understands and is familiar with how a catalog works.

It's typically easier to just have the data in the database and build a normal e-commerce/catalog site from that data.

There are still mail order companies with a huge investment in their print catalog production, and they still put out print catalogs with a look and feel that their customers have come to expect. In this particular case, The Roadster Factory has 26,000 part numbers in their pricelist, which they felt made the traditional "amazon database" online ecommerce format prohibitively complicated and expensive.

I would also assume that the site and PDF would have to be heavily configured to work correctly.

The site is typical LAMP. I do have some non-standard php.ini settings, but nothing particulary exotic, I'd say. The company emails me a high-res PDF of their catalog. I think that it differs from the one that they take to their printer in the respect that mine is sized at 130% from the 8 1/2 by 11 page size, just to give me sharper raster images. Also it doesn't have embedded fonts, but I don't know why, particulary. Most of their graphics are vector, so the resolution on those doesn't matter.

This interface is produced using a real cocktail of UNIX utilities and programming languages. The most specialized thing that I do is with a perl program mangling the text, as it is separated from the graphics and each page is generated on-the-fly as it is called. PHP functions update the prices real-time, and spit out the text. Obviously there's a shopping cart backend to handle the computation, ordering and notification, etc.

If you go to richFX.com, they have, in the last month or so, introduced a macromedia flash process to serve print catalogs. Their clients include Spiegel, Eddie Bauer, JJill, JCPenney and 200 others. LLBean is also offering flash catalogs as of this month. So, I think that there is some interest in this type of presentation.

Regards,

-Don

On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Jason Clinton wrote:

Just thought that I'd let you know that it doesn't work on my computer. The columns and content all overlap each other making the site unreadable.

Interesting. You're 67.48.110.134? I show you using Firefox on Debian (bravo) and trying two different screen resolutions, width 1024 and 1152?

This interface was mostly developed on debian Firefox and tweaked for everything else I could find, so I'm a bit perplexed. Oh, I know - hit CTL- (Control and - (minus)) until things line up. If you're too far away from "normal" font sizing, it can become a mess. If this doesn't help, would you mind sending me a screenshot?

Regards,

-Don

On Monday 31 January 2005 10:15 am, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

It would be much more helpful if you were to mention which BROWSER failed to render the site correctly, rather than which computer.

It was Mozilla Firefox, of course. Don and I discovered that the problem is Bitstream Vera (Sans) Serif.