We are seeking the development of a Flash-based paper document viewer. The scope of this project is purely the Flash-based viewer; we already have the server infrastructure for rendering documents in place. Ideally this viewer have a user interface similar to a typical PDF reader:
- The UI would consist of a top bar with the following controls:
-- For zooming: a zoom slider, a box showing the current zoom %, a fit-to-width and fit-page-to-window button.
-- An area showing the current page out of the total # of pages, with left and right buttons to navigate.
- There would be no search, selection, save, copy, or print functions.
- The main part of the viewer would be a dark gray area with pages arranged vertically. There would be a scroll bar that allows you to scroll all the way through the document (e.g., you can move off the bottom of one page to the top of another).
On the server side, we will be pre-rendering the documents as 200dpi .PNG files. When embedded in a page, the Flash application would receive a parameter with the URL of an .XML file that it must download. That .XML file would then contain some metadata (a filename, the number of pages), and URLs to the individual page images.
The pages can be provided by the server as full-resolution images that are scaled by Flash, or scaled down to meet the needs of the client (via a query-string parameter). Ideally, a design goal would be to minimize network traffic -- the Flash viewer should only load page images from the server on an as-needed basis, and do client-side scaling where possible.