[EP-tech] Forwarding PDF request to abstract page when referer from "outer" cyberspace

[Florian Heß]

Hello Eprints devs and users,

we have discussed the deployment of Coverpage plugin as is available in 
the EPrints bazar and finally decided to look for other solutions. Based 
on former experiences with LaTeX and PDF-Tk used in that plugin
   * there lurk problems with special signs and characters in 
non-european languages to be corrected manually forever - for that 
alone, xelatex in connection with a global unicode font could be our 
friend but ...,
   * with the TOC that is no more machine-readable via bookmarks when 
passed through PDF-tk & Co. - one could manage to update that data 
howsoever and end up correcting all the mistakes by hand again - thus 
rendering the file less accessible,
   * the storage capacity to reserve is doubled because the coverpage'd 
version exists in addition to the original version. There seems to be no 
caching / expiration mechanism to obtain balance between storage and cpu 
usage.

What we want to try now is to evaluate the referer of a PDF request. If 
it is either not set at all, or if it begins with the base_url of the 
repository, the response will be the PDF. Otherwise, maybe unless there 
is a defined request header Accept: application/pdf, the response is the 
abstract page that contains information on usage terms / license, 
further parts of the document and alike.

Can E-Prints 3.3.10 accomodate us with that in an update-safe manner?


Best regards
Florian Heß



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UB Heidelberg (Altstadt)
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