[NB: this facility is only available if the site owner has set up Opus to allow it.]
Before we explain how to make PDF, Postscript or Word documents into articles it's worth looking briefly at the issues behind this. If you have a web site then, in the ideal world all pages would be in HTML because then you can guarantee that any visitor will be able to read every page. It's often very easy to do this if the document is simple: just use "Select all" (typically Ctrl+A in Windows) to select all the text in the document and then copy it into your scratchpad (Ctrl+C) before pasting it (Ctrl+V) into the text box of an Opus article.
However there are some situations where it is better to use PDF, Postscript or Word when putting a document on the Web. These include:
In such cases you can use the "Upload document" option in the Author Menu. This makes the document into an Opus article.
PDF is always a better choice than Word or Postscript as it makes your document available to the widest range of readers. There are shareware tools available such as Pdf995 which make it easy to convert Word documents to PDF format.
Loading a document is very similar to creating an article, but with two importance differences.
You can also enter a headline and text describing the document just as if
it is an ordinary article. You can use the tag {docicon}
to include an icon for a Word or PDF document as appropriate.
If you choose to introduce the article then you can put in a
{document} tag in the text to create a hyperlink to the
document. For example:
Click {document>here} to view the document.
If you don't do this then Opus will automatically append text to the end of the article text with a hyperlink in.
When the reader selects an article which is a document then, if the "Introduce document" checkbox isn't checked then the reader is taken straight to the document.
If the "Introduce document" checkbox is checked then the reader is first taken to a page which uses the headline and text to describe the document to the reader and from there they follow a hyperlink which takes them to the document.
It's often useful to be able to create a page which contains an index of
all the documents you have uploaded. A good example of this is if you are
loading minutes of meetings to your Opus web site and want a page which
contains a date ordered index of all your minutes. This is where the
{index} tag comes in. It's a rather special tag, and you are
likely to only use it once in one article, so if you're not the site owner
or editor you are unlikely to ever use it.
Its syntax is:
{index:section_list:sort_by:asc_desc:class>none_this_month_text}
Where:
paperstyle.css this gives you a lot of control over the format
of the index.{index} tag for minutes which are uploaded as articles to
section 10 or 11 might read:
{index:10|11>There were no meetings this month.}
Whether or not your documents can be included in searches will depend on how your publisher has set up your Opus system. If the right tools are available then Opus will extract all the text from the document so the search engine can include it in searches, otherwise it will search only on the headline and text.