I want to display a PDF file directly on my site. I uploaded it to a CMS case, and can display it on Windows users’ with the following embed:
Unfortunately this “plugin” is not supported on Android devices. I don’t know if it’s supported on iOS.
Here is my site Read-Only: https://preview.webflow.com/preview/demamendres?utm_source=demamendres&preview=f4f4a42324e5615a960a2c56d166819f
Which plugin?
PDF’s are not accessible and therefore normally suck. If your purpose is to share information (not a printable document) why not provide the content as HTML?
You could also use Google Drive, it will render a PDF when visiting the shared location. Just upload the PDF, get a shareable link, and provide it to the user.
For some reason the original embed code was not included in my post:
object data=“https://uploads-lotsofinternalidstuff.pdf” style=“width: 100%; height: 800px; display: block;”></object
I left off the opening and closing brackets. I did not use any plugin other than this code. I don’t want the user to have to click on a link, I want the file to be displayed in the site itself. It works fine in Chrome for Windows, but not on Android.
PDFs are not accessible? What exactly does that mean? I can’t provide the document as HTML because I don’t have the access to the original content.
Not Internet Explorer and on Android Google recommends a plugin.
I meant that you don’t have universal cross-browser support by default. Some browsers do not support PDF embedding. Most notably is IE and Apple IOS Safari. See Chart => Comparison of web browsers - Wikipedia
Document Accessibility is subject to be concerned about as well. However, since you are not the author, that does not fail on you. For those that do, this is worth reading => WebAIM: PDF Accessibility - Defining PDF Accessibility
When you embed a PDF, the question of what is being embedded comes into question. How does one know who the authoritative source for the document is? Is it you? The Maryland Senate? If I go to a government site, the file is typically presented as a link and I can see the source of the link. Trust is important.
Back to the issue for you, you could opt to leverage https://pdfobject.com/ (An open-source standards-friendly JavaScript utility for embedding PDF files into HTML documents). As for android (what flavor?), you could test the examples at PDFObject.
PDFobject detects support for embedding (object, embed) and if it is not present a link to the document is presented. Fallback is nice.
Good luck.
I was able to use a simple iframe reference. That worked just as well in Windows, and on Android provided a link to open the file in Adobe Reader. Not ideal but it works.
While I misunderstood your reference to accessibility, I was unaware of the problems with the various browsers and platforms. I’ll deal with those one way or another.
Thanks for your responses.