Re: HTML to Executable

[Max Wyss <prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch>]

Bryan,

must it really be HTML?

For putting documents on a CD, adding an expiration date, and have a 
full text search engine, your documents seem to be pretty well suited 
for a simple and elegant PDF solution.

As you are in a file server environment (the CD, or installed 
documents on the local machine), you can use Acrobat Catalog to 
create the index, which do support the Search plug-in (which is 
standard of the Acrobat Reader installation). You could set up Reader 
to "autorun" from the CD, or at least automatically mount the index 
when the CD is loaded. Compared to that, you would need some kind of 
webserver to handle the index in a HTML environment.

For the expiration date, you would even have several possibilities, 
depending on how "hard" the expiration would be. The softest way 
would be adding a form field to every page containing some kind of 
watermark which says "expired", and which is displayed automatically 
when the system date is beyond the expiration date. On the other end, 
a very hard solutin would be using FileOpen PDF (from Fileopen; 
http://www.fileopen.com), which could prevent the document from being 
displayed if beyond expiration date (and you would have quite a few 
more additional security options as well). In a HTML environment, 
there are no security systems which would not require the 
accessabiltiy to a server (and then, you could really wonder why 
putting everything on a CD anyway).

Hope, this can help.



Max Wyss
PRODOK Engineering
Low Paper workflows, Smart documents, PDF forms
CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland

Fax:  +41 1 700 20 37
e-mail:  mailto:prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch
http://www.prodok.ch



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We are in the process of single-sourcing from Word documents. We use HTML
Transit to create HTML files from Word documents (partly from great
advice from this listserv).

The next step, however, is to convert the HTML to an executable and save
the execuatble on a CD. My co-worker has found about 20 of these
programs.

The two things we want to focus on are:
	Can it create a search engine?
	Can it have an expiration date? (these are government documents
and will be updated reguarly)

Any suggestions? Thanks.