How to embed a PDF in an HTML page?

Question

I need to embed a PDF file in an HTML page for the users to see it on every major device. Most of the approaches work fine on desktop but they start to show problems on iPad devices. The PDFs are no longer scrollable if placed inside an iframe or embed tag.

I used the following techniques to overcome the problem:

1) Using pdf-image for node and converting the PDF to images and then sliding them in a div. The problem in this approach is that the image quality gets degraded and is not suitable for viewing on Web.

2) Using PDF.js by Mozilla It works fine on every device but it makes the page extremely slow and unresponsive on iPad

3) Using Google PDF viewer

<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://public-Url-of-pdf.pdf&embedded=true" frameborder="0" height="500px" width="100%"></iframe>

The problem with this approach is that I need to make my PDFs publicly available which I don't want to do for security reasons.

None of the above method is working for me. Is there any solution available to embed PDF in a page which works on iPad also.

One of my colleagues told me about using LibreOffice(open office) headless to embed PDFs in my page but I cannot find any documentation about it usage?

Can anyone please help? :(

Thanks in advance!

Solution 1

<embed src="http://example.com/the.pdf" width="500" height="375" />

Try above one for pure HTML. But another option is if you'd like to use with javascript, try Pdf.js by mozilla. https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

Solution 2

I think the simplest way to embed a PDF into a web page is to use the object tag:

<object data="assets/test.pdf" type="application/pdf" width="100%" height="800px">
 <p>It appears you don't have a PDF plugin for this browser.
 No biggie... you can <a href="assets/test.pdf">click here to
  download the PDF file.</a></p>
</object>

What the code above will do is: - If the user browsing your site has a PDF viewer plugin (which is included by default in some browsers) it will open the PDF in the browser: - If the user does not have a PDF viewer plugin, they will be presented with a link to download the PDF and view it on their site.

Comments

[writeToBhuwan]

Let me try that on an iPad

[writeToBhuwan]

Doesnt work on iPad. I've already mentioned this in my question.

[writeToBhuwan]

You are telling me things which I've already tried.Read my question please

[PPShein]

Unresponsive means it's up to your pdf size. Your page will be freezing while loading pdf. At that time, you better make some tricky part as make visibility: hidden while page is loading and change to visibility: inline when page is loaded completely.

[writeToBhuwan]

Doesnt work on iPad :( Just shows the first page and some part of the second page. And no scroll bar avaiable to scroll the pdf

[writeToBhuwan]

@PyaePhyoeShein I am testing this on safari only. Any workaround for this?

[PPShein]

@writeToBhuwan i have no idea to use <object> for apple device. Could you try what I've mentioned under my post?

[Node_Ninja]

@writeToBhuwan This is the compatibility list of browsers for the object tag: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/… Would it be possible to post your cost on Stackblitz