Embedded Document Viewer: recommendations please

[jpadie]

Hi

I have a requirement to upload documents (word, mainly) to a website and to have the viewable on screen in their original format and ON THE WEB PAGE. i.e. i do not want the user to download the docs and read outside of the web flow in a pdf viewer.

I can probably manipulate the word docs automatically into either tiff/jpeg/png. Each document will be up to 200 pages long.

Does anyone have any solution recommendations? an embeddable tiff viewer? flash viewer? perhaps something like the amazon look inside the book function?

html is not a great transfer medium for word documents as you lose the markup bubbles, and the formatting is far from optimal. I want to maintain as close to an exact print copy as possible.

tia
Justin

 

[johnwm]

Can you send PDFs with a header type set to "application/pdf"?

You may find that image files 200 pages long are going to be rather slow downloads, even on ADSL. Unless you are in an intranet situation, where you can control your clients' browsers I would try to steer clear of 'Word' proprietary formats as a distribution medium.

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[jpadie]

Hi John

this is not for distribution but for storage in a case management system. Word is the default for all lawyers all over the world and for all courts that I deal with. No choice there, in the creation at least, nor for the distribution as documents need to remain editable for legal exchange.

As for the display, think about the logic as a blog (not accurate but a good metaphor). I need the display to be 'in line' with the rest of the content. setting the content header to application/pdf will just fire off a viewer in the browser. I'm looking for something that will sit in the web-flow itself.

agreed that a 200 page document will be horrible to load. i was thinking of a paged solution if I had to go via a single image solution.

thanks
justin

 

[Foamcow]

Take a look at

http://www.zoho.com/

They do what you are asking I think and they have an API so you can use their conversion tools on your own site.

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