Getting PDF to stay in an embedded <object> or <iframe> - html

I've edited this quite a bit and bolded my question at this point. I realize that PDF won't be fully controllable in the browser, but that's not my issue here. My problem is, well, below in bold.
<div>
<object
data="${pageContext.request.contextPath}/UB04.xml"
type="application/vnd.adobe.xdp+xml"
width="415" height="500"/>
</div>
The XML is actually an XDP file; it gives dynamic data and a URL for a static PDF, and combines them in Adobe Reader. This displays in the browser as desired if it's a PDF, but when put in as an XDP, it takes control of the window and opens itself fullscreen to display the PDF. Serving an all-in-one XDP (with the PDF embedded as base64) has the same issue.
Help me make the XDP behave the same as a PDF?
Alternatively, if I can use iText to glue together the XDP XML and the static PDF template, I can serve the PDF directly, which seems to work just fine. Just not sure how to create PDF that route, which is somewhat underwhelmingly documented online.

This behavior is dictated by the user agent (client), and that is how it should remain. Sorry.

One possible solution: use iText to join the data into the PDF, skipping XDP entirely.

What you are looking for is called Adobe Flashpaper:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashpaper/examples/
Otherwise you cannot dictate how the user will view the PDF.

Related

embed a pdf archive like it were part of the html code

i had a little question, i want to embed a pdf like it were part of the website, i could rewrite the pdf in html but it will be a lot of work, what would be the best looking option to embed it?
The pdf has pictures and letters with fonts and columns.
Thanks.
I would go with one of the two approaches. One is a native rendering of the PDF content in a DOM node, using PDF.js. It is an open source library that's used as the default PDF viewer in Firefox.
Another way is to emulate the look by converting the PDF pages to images when the PDF is uploaded. You may use imagemagick to parse the pages, and display the content in a slideshow/gallery widget.

Can you embed an HTML webpage in a PDF file?

A flash file can be embedded in a PDF document. Does anyone know if it is also possible to embed an HTML webpage?
Added:
I don't mean just a plain HTML document, but a webpage with Javascript too.
The answer is no.
While you can embed videos, sounds and SWF files in a PDF, dynamic HTML files aren't supported. (Adobe AIR is more suitable to package and distribute HTML files).
The best you can do in a PDF is to use the ATTACH option in Adobe Acrobat. This will "attach" any file with the PDF document similar to how you add an attachment with an email. But the attachment can't be viewed within the PDF document, and has to be opened separately.
More info:
Javascript can be added to PDF files and used to manipulate various elements within the PDF file.
Not directly. Depending on what you're looking for, however, you can use something like dompdf (PHP) to generate a PDF file from an HTML document, then merge that document with your original. It even supports JavaScript, up to the level Adobe Reader supports JavaScript.
That said, the PDF file format is really for things you want to print (i.e. want to look the same everywhere), not things you want to click on (i.e. look sensible everywhere). Adobe's decision to include Flash support was probably made from a marketing standpoint, not a technical one.
The best workaround would be to create a web/html viewer in Adobe Flash and embed that in a PDF as an SWF. There is an option to "Add SWF" in Acrobat under "Rich Media."
Created a NPM module that allows you to add custom HTML and CSS to PDF's.
const pdf = require('add-html-to-pdf');
var options = {
input: 'sample.pdf',
output: 'done.pdf',
html: "<div style='color:red'>This is awesome!</div>",
useDocker: true
}
pdf.insertHTMLInPDF(options);
You could reconstruct the html, css and js on the web page using php.
Im using a plugin with a wordpress site that is pretty outdated but works very well for creating pdfs with html, css and javascript.
it's called tcpdf
plugins/tcpdf/tcpdf.php
https://tcpdf.org/examples/
the pdf is made on the fly as a function.

Display/Render RTF doc in browser display using html textarea or something similar

My web application has an feature wherein preformatted RTF documents are used as templates and the user can select the source of data and then merge with the RTF documents templates to create merged RTF files. The RTF templates have placeholders which get replaced with user selected content. The final doc can either be saved or opened directly if word/wordpad is available on the local users machine.
Now, I have a requirement to display the merged document to the user for confirmation. The user may either print or save the document to the system directly. The display should not be word/wordpad application but should be within the application itself, using textarea or something similar to render the document. Can you please let me know if its possible to render the RTF document in textarea or not. Along with the displayed content, there should be options to print and save the document.If I have to convert the RTF to Html and then display the html content in textarea , please let me know how i can do the conversion and then display the html in the page.
That's a very difficult requirement. First of all, let's dismiss the idea about a <textarea>, because it does not support any formatting at all. All the WYSIWYG editors you've seen out there are based on <iframe>s.
Secondly, no browser can directly display a RTF. You can embed it as an <object>, and some might show it (IE probably will), but I can't say which ones won't. Portable devices almost certainly won't. But you should test this though, maybe it works well enough after all.
Failing that, HTML conversion is also out of question, because RTF has very very many features that cannot be emulated in HTML. There are some converters out there (google), but but they will all come with serious limitations. If you want full support, you will have to do your own rendering via Canvas or Flash or something.
To this end I'd suggest checking out Google Docs. They've gone through all of this hassle and have a rather feature-full engine for displaying most possible documents. I think it was also possible to embed them in your own webapges, though I've never checked it out myself.
Use a <PRE> tag to Display/Render RTF doc in browser.

How to embed a PDF file in a web site?

I simply want to embed a PDF file in a web site.
The best solution I've found is Google Docs Viewer (http://docs.google.com/viewer), but it does not work for IE and obviously that is not going to work for me.
Anyone have a clean, easy solution to this?
Update: I should add that one of the benefits of embedding the PDF file the Google viewer way is that as the PDF file I link to gets updated (and it could without notice to me), my site would automatically be holding the same PDF file (provided the full pathname doesn't change, which it does not). For this reason converting the file to an image is not preferred while.
Well since you obviously don't want to force someone to download the bloated insecure pdf plugin, why not let them use the bloated insecure flash player?
http://flexpaper.devaldi.com/
But really it is just a simple as
<iframe src="path/to/pdf" width="500" height="700">
If you do stick with the pdf embedded option, Byron is right although embedded pdf files don't look so great on a webpage. Anyway, be sure to be strict about the coding. Hence:
<iframe src="path/to/pdf" width=500 height = 700>
Should be
<iframe src="path/to/pdf" width="500" height="700">
Small alteration.
Updated answer for HTML5:
<object data="filename.pdf" type="application/pdf">
Your browser does not support pdfs, <a href="filename.pdf">click here to
download the file.</a>
</object>
You can read about it here:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_object.asp
How long is the pdf file? Can't you convert it to a very long image and display that in a div with a scrollbar?
Probably the best approach is to use the PDF.JS library. It's a pure HTML5/JavaScript renderer for PDF documents without any third-party plugins.
Online demo: http://mozilla.github.com/pdf.js/web/viewer.html
GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js
enter link description here
You can also use Google PDF viewer for this purpose. As far as I know it's not an official Google feature (am I wrong on this?), but it works for me very nicely and smoothly. You need to upload your PDF somewhere before and just use its URL:
<iframe src="http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://example.com/mypdf.pdf&embedded=true" style="width:718px; height:700px;" frameborder="0"></iframe>
I just ftp mine, I do not use Google or any other s/w
you must have some need other than a PDF file sitting in a directory, what is it?
Also, why would you convert the image (and reduce PDF resolution and clarity) ?
Response to Comments
That is the ugliest thing I have seen since my last trip to Africa. You are not seriously thinking of posting that much information on a single page, are you. No one can read it, and I tried every magnification.
For that amount of info, you need to take an architectural approach.
Put a few controls on the front page, and feed the user a small amount of manageable info, about the area that they chose. Only.
Get the info from the source website/database and feed it into your website/database. Only needs to change when the source data changes. The whole linkage can be automated.
Then you just create nice clean pages, with a reasonable quantity of info, in a readable form, on each page.
This is a 20th Century Timetable. Note, not a 21st century timetable (look at Berlin or München for one of those). You really can't just scan an intense doc and provide it as an embedded PDF.
Note that you do not need the elaborate controls of CityRail. you can have just a few to allow select of the line and timetable.
then produce a page that is a simple form of the CityRail page.
or (the absolute minimum) one fully viewable, full size PDF per web page.
.
Like this simple viewable PDF. That example could be served up in one PDF for page 1 and 4 separate PDF pages for the rest; PDFs already have basic navigation, so I have used that feature and produced one 5-pager instead. Make sure you find and use the blue glass buttons and follow the navigation hints on the left top and bottom of each page.
Second to demonstrating the PDFs and navigation, look at the folder: the files are all PDFs.
Back to the original question. Now you can embed PDFs, but if you do, please do not mess with them. All the controls you have on the linked page are redundant; any browser facilitiates that even now, and will be doing so better in future. Eg. in simple viewable PDF, use your browser controls to increase/decrease magnification, move around the doc, etc.
Let's assume you finish your Google Maps page, that's the first or index page. Draw all the train lines in; when the user clicks on a train line, it takes them to either (a) a clean page produced from your db as per (1) which will look like (2), or (b) a single clean PDF in readable form as per (3). You could do the whole project just by manipulating files in directories.
A lot less work. No Google docs; no intermediate s/w to constrict you or work around. You can forget about IE and its multiple incarnations and strangulations; any other browser and its limitations. Concentrate on the data, and getting it out there in presentable form, not on the pitiful s/w and its fits and starts.
Cheers
From HTML5 :
<embed src="url" type="media-type" height="" width=""/>
For media-type refer, http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml
Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online.
Here's the code I used to embed the PDF file:
but you should replace the bold URL with your own address. As I mentioned, the document viewer works for PDF and PPT files.
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/embeddable-google-document-viewer.html

PdfSharp, GDI+ and HTML printing

I currently have a "PrintingWebService" that I call from an AJAX page with all the information that is needed to construct a highly customized PDF printout using PDF Sharp and the PDFSharp's GDI+ mode, which takes DrawString and other commands that work basically just like GDI+ only they are drawn to the PDF.
I then save the PDF file to a location on the webserver and return the file name from the web service, and the AJAX page opens a new window with the pdf file.
So far, it works well, however, there is one part of my AJAX page that I want to printout and I haven't come up with a solution for yet. I've got a string of the HTML content of a TinyMCE editor that I want to dispay in the bottom part of the PDF page.
I'm looking for some sort of tool I could use for this purpose. Even something opensource that prints to GDI+ I could use by taking the source code and translating it to use PdfSharp's GDI+ (the class names are like XGraphics, with each class having X before the GDI+ name).
If I have to I will limit what HTML can be generated by TinyMCE and write my own renderer, but that will be a big challenge, so I'm looking for other solutions first.
I've stayed away from a printer-friendly page approach because I wanted to construct a page that was a near identical of an existing WinForms printout, using my existing code. With PdfSharp I was able to convert all the code except the text area stuff (which used the RichTextBox and RTF in the WinForms version).
Tony,
I personally have used WebSupergoo's ABCPdf library with much success. You can actually render HTML directly to the PDF and it does fairly well in regards to accuracy.
Another free software that will allow you the flexibility of writing HTML to PDF that I have used in the past with much success is iTextSharp.
Otherwise, I think you'll have to write something to render HTML to GDI.
Either way, you may want to consider using an HttpHandler that you map to using your web.config to generate the PDF file. This will allow for you to render the PDF to a bytestream and then dump it directly to the user (as opposed to having to save each PDF receipt to the web server). It will also allow for you to use the .pdf extension in the page that returns the receipt (PurchaseReceipt.pdf could be mapped to a HttpHandler)... making it more cross-browser friendly. Older versions of Adobe / Browsers will not display correctly if you start throwing a PDF byte stream from an ASPX page.
Hope this helps.