PdfServer 1.0 - Serve pdf's directly to a portable device

[headkaze]

This is a program based on Howard Casto's recent proposal for an app to read pdf's on a portable device. His idea was to e-mail them to the device and I don't think it's the best way to do it because they are often large and there are lag times when sending and receiving e-mail.

So I came up with the idea of serving up a pdf directly through a mini web server. This means it's pretty much immediate but it also means you can have a whole bunch of pdf's stored on a PC and serve them up to any portable device. It also has the added bonus of not taking up valuable space on your portable device. I've tested it on my iPod and iPad and it works quite well.

It's pretty simple to use.. you run the PdfServer.exe which will create a PdfServer.ini file. You can leave the defaults and test it's working on locahost by entering http://localhost:8080 into a web browser. Included is the 1942.pdf for test purposes so if you can view that then it's working. Now you can put your PC's internal IP into PdfServer.ini and access the pdf's from a portable device using wifi. Eg. http://192.168.1.123:8080

The only downside to this system is it's one way communication at the moment. So you get a list of pdf's and you scroll through to select the one you want to view, rather than have the PC serve up the pdf of the currently running game, for example. But I think this is better anyway because you can use it for any pdf's you want and not just manuals for MAME.

Download PdfServer 1.0

[headkaze]

Turns out there are registry settings that are needed for GhostScript. I'll post an update soon.

[headkaze]

Okay it should be fixed now. For Windows 7 users you will need to right-click and select 'Run As Administrator' so it can access the registry.

[Seith]

Cool.  I read Howard's original post and thought the same thing - why e-mail?  What if you play the same game twice?  Isn't that just unnecessary data transferring at that point?