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jeudi 04 août 2011 (1 post)

[UPDATE]: A reader from planet debian (thank you Ross!) just made me noticed that this was definitely not useful. On the (standard) intel documentation page, there's some icons on the top right, like stuff for social networks (facebook, linkedin, twitter and some other), a print icon and a down arrow which I didn't notice at all but which is a direct download link to the PDF. Sorry Intel for doubting you!

Starting recently, Intel has started to provide documentation using a flash pdf viewer (example here). This is really painful. I personnaly don't use flash (the flash player is not installed on most of my boxes), I have concerns over flash security wise and I don't like the fact it's proprietary, that the x86_64 version lags behind etc. On top of that, just *using* the flash pdf viewer is painful. It's slow, you're restricted to your browser, search is inexistent, you can't save them for reading them offline.

Trying to dig a little inside the Intel website, I had a thought. Who in the world can't use flash? Linux people, yes (at least some of them) but nobody cares. But iPhone/iPad users don't have flash player on their OS, meaning they can't read Intel docs. Or can they?

Thanks to the “Inspect element” tool in webkit browsers, one can easily watch the above website and see something interesting. The div containing the flash applet is style like:

<div id="viewerPlaceHolder" class="nonipad">

 

and just below we can see:
<div class="ipad hidden">
<a href="/content/dam/doc/manual/64-ia-32-architectures-software-developer-vol-1-manual.pdf" class="icon pdf" title="Headline">64-ia-32-architectures-software-developer-vol-1-manual.pdf</a>
<h2><a href="/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/64-ia-32-architectures-software-developer-vol-1-manual.html" title="Headline">Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Developer's Manual: Vol. 1</a></h2>
<!-- <h3>Lorem Ipsum</h3> -->
<!-- <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adip.</p> --> </div>
(I like the lorem ipsum part, too). The class ipad hidden is defined in the intel.iOS.css, which is included through:

<script type="text/javascript">  
if ((navigator.userAgent.indexOf('iPad') != -1)) { 
document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/etc/designs/intel/us/en/css/intel.iOS.css" media="screen" />'); 

</script>

So here's a solution!

TL;DR:

So you want access to the real pdf link? Just set your user agent to the iPad (seems that iPhone works too) and you'll be presented with a link on a PDF icon. It should be possible to use a userscript or a userstyle for that too, though I can't remember how to write one right now.

Corsac@07:58:38 (Debian)

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