Integrated document viewer

Abstract

In various embodiments of the present invention, documents (eg, PDFs) are converted into HTML 5 (and CSS 3) formats and integrated into existing HTML 5 web pages to preserve the original embedded fonts. The fonts can also be integrated or embedded (e.g., via the standard HTML “iframe” tag) into other web pages. The original appearance of the source document is maintained, the text is preserved as searchable text, and the document is integrated into a web page that can be searched, zoomed, scrolled, and printed utilizing standard web browser controls. A significantly increased “ad inventory” is thereby enabled, wherein advertisements can be integrated between pages, or even within a page. Moreover, the resulting document can be passively shared with members of a user's external social networks (including those within the host website), along with other activities and behaviors performed by the user on the hosting website.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is a Divisional of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13 / 189,372 filed Jul. 22, 2011 which is a Divisional of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12 / 912,625 filed Oct. 26, 2010 both titled: “Integrated Document Viewer With Automatic Sharing of Reading-Related Activities Across External Social Networks,” which claims the benefit (pursuant to 35 U.S.C. §119(e)) of (i) U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 61 / 326,166, filed Apr. 20, 2010, entitled “Integrated Document Viewer with Automatic Sharing of Reading-Related Activities Across External Social Networks,” and (ii) U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 61 / 330,161, filed Apr. 30, 2010, entitled “Integrated Document Viewer with Automatic Sharing of Reading-Related Activities Across External Social Networks with Additions.” The entire disclosure of all of them are expressly incorporated herein by reference in their entireties.I. BACKGROUND[0002]A. Field of Art[0003]This appl...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

"The present invention provides techniques, apparatus, and systems for displaying documents on a website without compromising their original nature and appearance. The invention utilizes the @font-face tag to allow for the downloading of custom fonts embedded in a PDF document and their integration into a web page. The resulting document can be shared with external social networks, enhancing the host website's advertising opportunities. The value of passive sharing cannot be underestimated as it provides communication and advertising benefits to users and their social networks."

Problems solved by technology

Initially, documents displayed on a computer screen were limited to text, with little or no choice of fonts, much less page layout and formatting of any kind.

Maintaining a document's appearance as it is distributed among different computers and platforms (including its appearance when printed or displayed within a web page) has long been a problem addressed by various software technologies.

At this point, it is virtually impossible to distinguish the appearance of a document created as a web page (HTML) from that of one created as a more traditional page-oriented document via a word processing, presentation or page layout program.

Even PDF documents, however, have been difficult to integrate into web pages, while preserving their intended appearance, due to historical formatting limitations of the HTML format, which traditionally has allowed for the display of only a limited number of fonts.

Yet, these programs cause the document to occupy the entire web browser window (along with the controls typically associated with Adobe's “Acrobat” program for displaying PDF documents).

Thus, the author of a web page cannot easily integrate an existing PDF document as part of a web page that includes other web elements or objects, such as text, images, advertisements, etc.

This approach has a number of disadvantages, however, in that the PDF document is not truly integrated into the web page; instead it remains in a separately controlled window within that web page.

For example, a user must scroll through the PDF document separately from the rest of the web page, resulting in the significant inconvenience of having to switch between scrolling through the PDF document and scrolling through the web page.

In short, the PDF document becomes a separately controllable object that is subservient to the primary web browser controls for the overall web page window, resulting in significant inconvenience to the user.

This approach defeats the primary objective of preserving the author's intended appearance of the PDF document.

To the extent this approach employs a separately scrollable window, it suffers from the same disadvantages as noted above.

Even if the image of the entire document is truly integrated into a discrete area of the web page (as opposed to a separate scrollable “sub-window”), this approach, while preserving the appearance of text, does not preserve the nature of the text itself.

In other words, the ability to search and recognize the text is sacrificed, which results in a significant loss of functionality.

Not only are users unable to search through the PDF document, but other programs cannot search through and identify words and phrases within the PDF document, a critical feature for targeted advertising engines.

Yet, this “thin client” approach suffers from a number of disadvantages that result from converting the PDF document into an “image” rather than directly into text (along with the fonts that determine the appearance of that text).

For example, the “image” of each page of the document is significantly larger than the corresponding text on that page (even apart from other non-text elements on the page), resulting in an additional delay before each page of the document can be delivered to and displayed by the user's web browser.

Moreover, the frequent server interaction imposes further delays whenever the user interacts with the document, e.g., by scrolling to a new page or selecting or searching for words within the document.

Even though the “image” of each page can be “zoomed” with the user's standard web browser controls, the words of the document become distorted when zoomed (as would any bitmapped image of text), causing Google to include a custom “zoom” control to avoid this distortion, but at the expense of further delay due to additional server interaction.

Yet, actively choosing to share an activity or behavior is burdensome.

While passive sharing is becoming increasingly more common, it has yet to be integrated into the activities or behavior within a website independent of the sharing process itself.

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