LIVESCRIBE 3/ECHO/PULSE - One-Click Playback of Livescribe PDFs

How can I post Livescribe PDFs to a web page so that others can just click on the PDF to play it back without downloading it to their computer?

The steps below for making a Livescribe PDF accessible on a web page for one-click playback or "remote access to the web player" is mainly to assist teachers with allowing easy access to their lessons for their students, but can be followed by any Admin that hosts the web site the Livescribe PDFs will be stored on.

A teacher can post a pencast on his/her classroom website so that students can simply click on it once to display and interact with it in a browser-based player (Firefox excluded).   

Two things are required to enable this functionality:

1. The teacher posts a custom link on the classroom web page.
2. The school IT Admin enables access to Livescribe Player through the link.

Details are listed below.

TEACHER

The IT Admin provides a path where the teacher needs to save the Livescribe PDFs and a corresponding URL for the files saved there.

The teacher creates a custom link for each pencast by combining the link address of the Livescribe Player (http://www.livescribe.com/player) with the link address of his/her posted Livescribe PDF, separating the two links by only a question mark: ?  

Here is an example:


The teacher posts the merged Livescribe PDF link on his/her classroom website.  Once the link is posted on the webpage, a student clicking on the link sees the Livescribe Player launch in a new browser tab, with the specified Livescribe PDF displayed and ready to play.  NOTE: If Firefox is the default browser and the student does not want to change it, they can copy the link and paste it in the address field of the latest versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Safari.

SCHOOL IT ADMIN

The administrator of the server that hosts the classroom website must enable Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, or CORS.  Doing so is quite simple - the server only needs to add the following header to its response: Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *  

NOTE:  For more details, visit the enable-CORS website at http://enable-cors.org/server.html.

Here are the technical steps that should be followed by a server administrator to enable Remote PDF access via Livescribe web player.

1. Manually prepend Livescribe web player URL to PDF URL.
2. Add the following directive to Apache configuration file: e.g. httpd.conf       
3. Restart Apache.
4. Prior PDF headers might have been cached by browser, so clearing of browser cache might be needed.

Windows Server 2003
Internet Information Services 6.0 Configuration

1. Select Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager from Start Menu.     
2. In Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, right click on the folder containing the Livescribe PDFs. Select Properties from the popup menu.
   
   
3. Click on the HTTP Headers tab in the Properties dialog. Click on the Add button in the Custom HTTP headers section.
   
4. Enter 'Access-Control Allow-Origin' in the Custom header name textbox. Enter '*' in the Custom header value textbox. Click OK        
5. Congratulations! You have added a custom header for all files served from that folder.  Livescribe Web Player should now be able to access and load any Livescribe PDFs served from that folder.  Provide the teacher the path to the folder where the PDFs must be saved and a corresponding URL for the files saved there.
   

Windows Server 2008
Internet Information Services 7.0 Configuration

1. Select Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager from Start Menu.
   
2. Select the folder containing your Livescribe PDFs. Select HTTP Response Headers icon to configure the headers for that folder.
   
   
3. Select add from the Actions menu on the right. A dialog will pop-up. We will use this dialog to add our custom header, so that the PDF player on Livescribe.com can access your PDFs. Enter 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' in the Name field. Enter '*' in the value field. Click OK to apply the new header.
   
   
4. Congratulations! You have added a custom header for all files served from that folder.  Livescribe Web Player should now be able to access and load any Livescribe PDFs served from that folder. Provide the teacher the path to the folder where the PDFs must be saved and a corresponding URL for the files saved there.