Free cloud web hosting for your PDF flip books!

21 January 2014

Who doesn’t love a free lunch every now and then?! If you don’t have a server to upload your pdf flip book to then you can actually use DropBox for hosting your pdf documents! This guide will show you the few steps you need to go through if you want to publish your document using our desktop publisher and then host it for free on Dropbox. 

1) Download Desktop Publisher for Zine from the following location (it is available for both Mac OS X and Windows):
http://flowpaper.com/flexpaper_flip_zine.jsp</p>

</a>2) Open a PDF document in Desktop Publisher

Click on the top left button to open a PDF document you want to publish. Adjust your style and make your necessary adjustments for the document you want to publish
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3) When ready, publish the document it using the “Publish & View” button in the top right corner.
** Clicking the “Publish & View” button will bring up the publishing dialog which lets you adjust the settings for how you want to publish the document. Leave all settings as they are without modifying them.
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4) Click the “Publish” button and wait for FlexPaper to finish processing the document</strong>

Clicking this button will trigger FlexPaper to start processing your PDF document and convert it into required HTML5, HTML4 and Flash files so that your flip book publication can be viewed across multiple devices

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5) Click the “View folder” button when the publishing process has completed. </strong>

Clicking this button will show you the files you will need to copy to your DropBox folder. You can also chose to preview the publication by clicking the “View in browser” or “Mobile preview”. 

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6) Copy the files into your DropBox Public folder
** The DropBox Public folder is a folder where you can place files you want to make available to anyone and where you can host web files. Create a sub folder in this folder and call it “pdf-flip-book-publication”. Now copy all the files that Desktop Publisher has produced for you into this folder. 

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Voila! All done! If you want to try your publication in your browser, simply right click on the “index.html” file that you have copied into your destination folder and choose “Copy Public Link”. This will copy the URL for your publication into your clip board. You can paste this link into your browser to view your pdf publication. The link should look something like this:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/13295266/pdf-flip-book-publication/index.html

**HOW TO USE DROPBOX WITH YOUR DOMAIN (for advanced users)
** Dropbox can also be used with your own domain name if you prefer to share this as opposed to the dropbox.com domain. The following tutorial shows a good example on how to do this with CNAME records:

http://www.techairlines.com/custom-domain-dropbox/