That would be an interesting feature, and I haven’t thought of that before. Unfortunately I am otherwise committed at the moment so I’m not able to look deeply into this immediately. However you may be able to accomplish this by seeing if there is a particular reproducible rhyme or reason to the URL of the first page image that the viewer displays. (You can get that URL from Firefox by right clicking on the first page image, and Copy Image Location, or just View Image and look at the URL in the address bar.) If there’s a common way to reproduce that image link across documents, or all documents of a particular file type, it should be pretty simple to add the ability to use it as a thumbnail.
The plugin is open source so if you do make mods that are helpful, I’m happy to incorporate them in future versions with credit given.
Kevin
Hi Kevin
Thank you very much for your reply (I’m a programmer on Sarit’s team, and I implemented Sarit’s request). Your suggestion worked, and we were able to create the thumbnails.
However now we have run into a problem – the thumbnails are a little slow to load, and therefore sometimes the site doesn’t load them at all and we have empty spaces where the thumbnails should be.
I noticed that in the post, the images are also sometimes slow to load, but there is a “loading” image that appears until the image load is finished. Is that something I could use with the thumbnails? And if so – how? Or do you have another suggestion? Is there a way in which we could save the image on our server?
The manner of doing this is dependent upon how you implemented the thumbnails… I’d have to see an example page or the mods to make any particular suggestion about this.
Please link to a page containing the plugin… if you’d like to do so privately, you can use the support link in your plugin list, or find my email address in the GPL statement at the top of gviewer.php. Thanks.
Sorry I didn’t explain what I’m linking to. In this page, Under the header “Student Materials”, there are 3 image. Those are the thumbnails derived from your plugin, that are giving us the problem I described earlier.
leac,
This is safely beyond the scope of this plugin, but there are several ways you might go about this. Here are a couple I thought of:
1) You could use jQuery/javascript (or something similar) to preload an image and then switch once the desired image is loaded. Here is a random Google search result (untested, but to illustrate the possibility):
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4635388/how-to-display-loading-image-while-actual-image-is-downloading
2) You could set a CSS background image that will display until the image itself displays over the top of it.
Kevin
