Stillhq.com PDF Database: FAQ

This page answers some of the frequently asked questions about the PDF database. If you have a question which is not answered here, feel free to email me at mikal@stillhq.com and ask it...


Why an online database of PDFs?
Since about July 2000, I have been working on a series of Open Source PDF projects. I started out with Panda, an Open Source PDF generation API, which quickly turned into the development of PandaScript, a scripting front end to Panda, and PandaLex, and bison and flex parser for PDF documents. I am currently working on another PDF project which ties all of these together, which I will announce later in the year. As part of this development process, I encountered a variety of PDF documents which were unusual, and cause my software problems. I kept these for regression testing purposes. Occassionally someone would mention that they would like to have access to the database.

I finally decided actually get around to making that access available. That's what these web pages are.


Can I have a .zip to download instead of all these files?

I have been asked quite a few times to make a .zip file of the database available for ease of download. I am hesitant to do this for a couple of reasons:
If you really want to entire database, then I am happy for you to have it. Because I don't have an FTP server, you'll need to use mirroring software to do that. On my various Unix boxes, I use the wget command for this, although there are many fine Windows products which will do this task as well. A command line such as:

wget -rc "http://www.stillhq.com/pdfdb/

Should do the trick. Please note that the database is quite large (over 100 megabytes last time I checked), so this might take a while to download.

You can also access the PDF database as a drive letter under modern versions of Microsoft Windows. Checkout the next item for more details.

What's this about mounting the PDF database as a drive letter under modern versions of Windows?

After some negotiation with my ISP, it is now possible to have the PDF database on my site as a drive letter under Windows. This makes it really easy to copy the entire database, as it is just a case of dragging and dropping to the new location. To get this working, right click on "My Computer" in Windows Explorer:



Then select a drive letter (my example uses P drive), and enter the URL to the PDF database:



Finally, you should have a new P drive which is the PDF database:



Now you can just drag and drop from P: drive as you would any other disk.

I've got a MacOS 9 box, can I mount the database as a drive?

A reader has pointed out that mounting the database as a drive is also possible on MacOS machines. Many thanks to JR Boulay for pointing this out.



Enter the URL to the database into the dialog:



And now it appears as a drive:



JR also recommends Goliath if you're using MacOS 8 or 9, and the inbuilt support is apparently nothing special.

I've got a MacOS X box, can I mount the database as a drive?

A reader has pointed out that mounting the database as a drive is also possible on MacOS machines. Many thanks to JR Boulay for pointing this out.
Simply hit Control-K form the Finder for the mount dialog:



Enter the URL to the database into the dialog:



And now it appears as a drive:




I've got a MacOS X box running French, can I mount the database as a drive?

A reader has pointed out that mounting the database as a drive is also possible on MacOS machines. Many thanks to JR Boulay for pointing this out. JR runs a French version of MacOS, so his sample pictures are from that.

Simply hit Control-K form the Finder for the mount dialog:



Enter the URL to the database into the dialog:



And now it appears as a drive:






PDF database administered by mikal@stillhq.com
Database Copyright (c) Michael Still 2003. PDFs Copyright their various authors.