How to download a Document from ipaper swf

Question

Hi guys I am trying to download a document from a swf link in ipaper

Please guide me on how can I download the book Here is the link to the book which I want to convert to pdf or word and save http://en-gage.kaplan.co.uk/LMS/content/live_content_v2/acca/exam_kits/2014-15/p6_fa2014/iPaper.swf Your kind guidance in this regard would be appreciated. Regards, Muneeb

Answer 1

first you open the book in your browser with network capturing (in developer/s tools). you should open many pages at diffrent locations with and without zoom then look in the captured data.
you will see that for each new page you are opening, the browser asks for a new file (or files).
this means that there is a file for each page and with that file your browser is creating the image of the page. (usually there is one file for a page and it is some format of picture but I encountered base64 encoded picture and a picture cut into four pieces).

so we want to download and save all the files that are containing the book's pages.
now, usually there is a consistent pattern to the addresses of the files and there is some incrementing number in it (as we can see in the captured data the difference between following files), and knowing the number of pages in the book we can guess ourselves the remaining addresses till the end of the book (and of course download all the files programmatically in a for loop) and we could stop here.

but sometimes the addresses are bit difficult to guess or we want the process to be more automatic.
anyway we want to get programmatically the number of pages and all the addresses of the pages.
so we have to check how the browser knows that stuff. usually the browser downloads some files at the beginning and one of them contains the number of pages in the book (and potentially their address). we just have to check in the captured data and find that file to parse it in our proram.

at the end there is issue of security:

some websites try to protect their data one way or another (ussually using cookies or http authentication). but if your browser can access the data you just have to track how it does it and mimic it.
(if it is cookies the server will respond at some point with Set-Cookie: header. it could be that you have to log-in to view the book so you have to track also this process. usually it's via post messeges and cookies. if it is http authentication you will see something like Authorization: Basic in the request headers).

in your case the answer is simple: (all the files names are relative to the main file directory: "http://en-gage.kaplan.co.uk/LMS/content/live_content_v2/acca/exam_kits/2014-15/p6_fa2014/") there is a "manifest.zip" file that contains "pages.xml" file which contains the number of files and links to them. we can see that for each page there is a thumb, a small, and a large pictures so we want just the large ones.
you just need a program that will loop those addresses (from Paper/Pages/491287/Zoom.jpg to Paper/Pages/491968/Zoom.jpg).
finally you can merge all the jpg's to pdf.