creating downloadable files

[ifyouonlyknew]

What's the best way to create downloadable files for use in a pswd protected area? Best Zip utilities?

Thanks

[toolman]

Hi ifyouonlyknew.

whatifiknewbutiwouldnttellyou?

Heehee. Welcome to Web Master World.

Try winzip. You can find it all over... just type in "winzip" at your local search engine.

[mivox]

If you're doing downloadable text files in your password protected area, PDF is a good file format, and it doesn't require compression. If you're doing downloadable images, JPEG and GIF formats are already compressed, so zipping them won't save much space.

And on the off chance you're using a Macintosh, ZipIt is a nice shareware zip utility.

[ifyouonlyknew]

Thanks alot toolman and mivox, I was thinking about doing PDF but I've never actually written anything in PDF so i'm not sure how to even create those documents or what it cost, and I know Adobe is usually expensive.

[mivox]

Acrobat is one of Adobe's cheaper programs. I'm almost positive it's under $200. A lot of other software can also export documents to PDF format... check the document export options in Microsoft Word or any desktop publishing software you might have.

[theperlyking]

Coreldraw also does a decent job of producing PDF's, not bad value either.

[Everyman]

You should be aware that the httpd.conf file for Apache has a timeout. The value is expressed in seconds. The default is usually 360, or 6 minutes. If you have big files, you may have to get the sysadmin to reset this. For example, the following setting is for 30 minutes:

# Timeout: The number of seconds before receives and sends time out.

Timeout 1800

With dial-up service, you should assume that folks can't download faster than 2000 bytes per second. Therefore, a timeout of 1800 seconds would be okay for files less than 3.6 megs.

The default setting of 360 seconds would only be good for a file of 720K or less. Many PDF files are larger than this.

[ifyouonlyknew]

thanks alot guys, gonna try to figure this one out.