DigitalPaper User Tips

DigitalPaper’s main function is to let you immediately view the pages of a document without needing to download the document to your computer. This is useful in many ways. For example, when using the service you can bookmark a page (store the web address), send the bookmark to a colleague, and when they click on it, the same page will open in their web browser.

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Our document server lets you perform an action on a group of documents; print or download several, documents at once, or add them to your Cart. In the search results screen you’ll, see a checkbox to the left of each item. Tick the items you wish to group together, then dick the top-menu action you want to perform on them: print, download, add to cart. Printing groups of documents is not recommended, as it can resul.t in large data transfers to your PC. Instead, add documents to your Cart, download your Cart, then open and print the documents directly from your PC. Unless you have a high bandwidth connection, downloading the original document is often much faster than trying to print them directly from our document server.

Using the Cart

When viewing your search results, look for the cart icon in the top right corner of your browser window. At any time, you can add or remove items, or perform an action on the cart contents. For example, if you have limited bandwidth connection (such as a home modem) you place items in the cart while you search and browse documents, and, when ready, fetch the contents of your cart in one continuous download.

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DigitalPaper defaults to showing document pages inside a viewing frame of 640 x 896 pixels. The size and orientation of this viewing frame can be customized. You can shrink or enlarge the frame to better suit your screen resolution or to make the frame match the page dimensions.

Along the bottom of the viewing frame, to the left of the DigitalPaper logo, you’ll find a dropdown box labelled ‘Size’. Click on the box to select a new frame size. Your browser should refresh automatically and display the page in the new frame. After changing the frame dimensions you can use the ‘Zoom’ dropdown box at the top of the viewing frame to change how the page appears in the frame — for example, choose ‘fit all’ to make the entire page fit inside the viewing frame.

Enlarging the viewing frame is useful for examining fine detail when using the ‘View Area’ tool (eye icon). For those on a slow dial-up connection, keeping a small viewing frame can reduce bandwidth and speed up access.

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Our DigitalPaper server stores documents in virtual cabinets. Each cabinet has its own custom-search page containing the searchable attributes for that cabinet. For this example we’ll use the GSWA Geoscience Products cabinet.

To begin,visit http://geodocs.doir.wa.gov.au/home.do  and click on the Documents link in the top menu. This presents the Search For Documents page. In the top right cornerclick on Select Cabinet and choose the GSWA Geoscience Products cabinet to activate its custom-search page.Let’s start our search: In the Title field enter *geochronology* — note the inclusion of asterisks on both sides of our search text. This performs a ‘wildcard’ search, returning all documents with the word ‘geochronology’ in the title. Without the asterisks DigitalPaper would search for documents with the exact title of ‘geochronology’, which would return no matching results.

Now click the Search button. The results screen will show at least nine document matches. Let’s repeat the search but narrow the results further: Click on the New Search link in the top blue panel, to return to the search page.Add the same title search criteria as before: *geochronology*. This time let’s search by Year also. Enter the value 2000 in that field. Click on Search again.This time our search returns a single document. Again, click on the New Search link to return to the main search page.Repeat your search on Title and Year, but this timefor Year enter this text: 1999|2000|2001 — the ‘pipe’ character (found above the ENTER key on a Microsoft keyboard) tells DigitalPaper to search for this OR that, or,in our case, search for 1999 OR 2000 OR 2001. So we can expect our search to return all documents in this cabinet where ‘geochronology’ appears in the Title and where the document was published in the year 1999, 2000, or 2001. Hit the Search button and see!

There is one more special search character you can use when searching: it is the question mark (?) character, Where you include a question mark in your search criteria text, DigitalPaper will search for any single character. Perform a new search, but this time enter *gold* in the Title field and in the Year field enter 2??? — DigitalPaper will return documents with ‘gold’ anywhere in the Title, and those documents published in 2000 or later. To get all similar documents published in the 1990s you could
search on a Year of 199?.

Experiment with these three special search characters — asterisk (*), pipe (|), question mark (?) — and you’ll soon learn how to quickly locate the documents you need.

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In the top right-hand corner of any document viewed in DigitalPaper is a small rectangular box with a thumbnail image of the page you are currently viewing. This is the Birds Eye View Panel, which allows you to see the full page while you are viewing any individual section. This feature can be switched on or off by clicking the Birds Eye View button to the right of the two Zoom buttons on the top toolbar.
The area of the page you are viewing will appear as a transparent green box in the Birds Eye View Panel. Clicking anywhere in the Birds Eye View Panel will instantly relocate the area you are viewing allowing you to quickly move around pages to wherever you wish to view.

Using the Zoom features

To zoom in or out on the page, use the two Zoom buttons in the middle of the toolbar at the top of the page. When you zoom in on a section of a page, this section will be highlighted with transparent green in the Birds Eye View Panel. You can also zoom in or out of the page using the pull-down menu to the left of the Zoom buttons to specify the percentage of the zoom.

Alternatively, if you wish to zoom in on a specific section of the page, click on the Define Area icon on the left frame and then click and drag over the area you wish to zoom in on, then click the View Area icon underneath it to zoom in on the area.

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Each document listed in the Search Results page has a set of action links: View, Properties, Print, and Download. When viewing results in Thumbnail mode, the actions show as text links on the left side of results. In Condensed mode they appear as icons on the right. These action links also appear as icons on the top edge of the page frame when viewing document pages in your browser.

View

Opens the document for viewing in your browser. Clicking on the document thumbnail performs the same action.

Properties

Here you can view the document’s properties (e.g. filename, file size, page count) and attributes.

Print

You can print a range of pages or the entire document. Note that using the DigitalPaper print function may result in a large data transfer over your internet connection. For best quality printing you may prefer to download the original document (typically a PDF file) and print locally from your computer.

Download

Initiates a file download for an individual document, allowing you to save a local copy on your computer. To download several documents at once, tick the checkbox for the documents you want and then click the Download link in the top menu. Before downloading files you should examine each document’s file size (see Properties above). Some files are very large and can take a long time to download, depending on your internet connection speed. If you choose to download multiple documents at once instead of downloading documents individually, DigitalPaper will send them to you in a single ZIP file called download.zip.

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