Is this proper behavior for PDF/apache byteserving?

[jimoblak]

I have a large PDF file on my website that I want to dish out one page at a time using byteserving. Example:

http://www.mysite.com/mydocument.pdf#page=12

Unfortunately, I am not seeing the page delivered instantly. It seems that the entire 3Mb PDF file must completely download first. Here is a sample from the Apache server log:

192.168.0.1 - - [28/Apr/2003:12:53:21 -0700] "GET /mydocument.pdf HTTP/1.0" 200 3020798 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461)"

Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6g


The PDF was created from InDesign with the setting of 'Optimize for Fast Web View'.


I would like to resolve this issue for two reasons:
1) to allow visitors to get instant access to a particular page.
2) to keep the bandwidth usage to a minimum to avoid extra hosting charges. This is not economical if one has to download the entire PDF just to see one page.


Can anyone explain what I might be missing here?


---
Byteserving is explained at:

http://www.adobe.com/support/techguides/acrobat/byteserve/byteservmain.html

- - picklefish - -

 

[jimoblak]

If anyone cares about the answer to this problem...

Adobe technical support just explained the full details about my byteserving dilemma:

Byteserving will not trim down the bandwidth used by your PDF files by serving only the requested page.

http://localhost/mydocument.pdf#page=5

will serve the same number of bytes as the complete document at

http://localhost/mydocument.pdf

Byteserving simply sends the data requested for a particular page FIRST for quick viewing. It then downloads the remaining data for the rest of the document in the background.

If you care about keeping bandwidth usage to a minimum, break your PDF document into smaller files.

- - picklefish - -