How do I display a PDF in Adobe Flex?

Question

Looking for a way to display a PDF in Flex. I'm sure there are several ways. Looking for the easiest to maintain / integrate / most user friendly. I'm guessing it's possible to display a browser window in the app and render it, but if it goes off of IE / FireFox it's not acceptable for this project.

Thanks...

Solution 1

This looks like a nice PDF viewer for flex http://www.devaldi.com/?p=212

Solution 2

We just did a large AIR app that used PDF quite a bit - make sure you save yourself some heartache and write some code to check the acrobat version or that it's even installed - if they don't have it you won't get an error, just a blank HTML control.

I know, it sounds obvious, but still...

Solution 3

Sorry to say so, but convertion PDF to kind of swf of flash things... doesn't that kill the PDF thoughts ?

I mean, PDF should be electronic paper right ? When creating a SWF file out of it, you just destroy that. No more editing, no more filling out a form.

The strange thing is, that PDF is an Adobe product... and Flex (Flash Builder) is a Adobe product.

Two products that Adobe wants to be world dominator off. But combining PDF into Flex... is not standard.

Solution 4

Check out: http://www.swftools.org/ for tools to convert your PDF to SWF, speifically pdf2swf- http://www.swftools.org/pdf2swf.html

Solution 5

Check out Share on Acrobat.com, there you can upload PDFs and make them embedable Flash files (sort of like YouTube for documents). Should be possible to load those into Flex. Not an ideal solution, but unfortunately you need to convert the PDF to an SWF somehow to be able to load it into a Flex application. I don't know of any good tools that do this. If someone else knows please share.

If you target AIR you can load a PDF into a HTML view, but that doesn't work when running in the browser (the HTML component is only available in AIR).

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Comments

[CrazyEnigma]

They are Adobe both products, but Flash/Flex came from Macromedia in the merger. It's unfortunate Adobe did not take advantage to integrate a PDF reader into Flash/Flex.