Document Delivery : ATAW Course Design Checklist (FlashPaper)
There is a problem with delivering Word documents in an online environment. The Word doc must be downloaded. This means further requirements for the user. This means time and possible aggravation spent off-task. And on top of that fonts and layouts can change depending on the user's set up! Adobe PDF files help solve layout and font issues (provided the fonts are embedded), but even PDFs need to open another program. This takes time and memory resources.Flashpaper (another Adobe product) offers a solution. The example below is a flash file (SWF) created from a word document and then embedded in the HTML page. The result is the user can now read, print and search the document without needing to open any special program. It's seamless. (And if you want students to be able to download and save material you can still give them that option, as I have done below with download links to pdf and doc files).
The icon next to the printer opens the Flash file in a new browser window. This is useful if you want to include the document but you are tight on space.