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Thread: PDF Viewer?

  1. #1
    Senior Member
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    PDF Viewer?

    Hey Guys,
    I am currently making a website for a charity (no charge not making any money from it at all)

    Every month they produce a newsletter in PDF format that they want to show online without the visitor having PDF viewer installed.

    I figured this could be done in flash as I've seen similar setups elsewhere but as you can imagine not luck,

    Can anyone help me locate an open source script that will load up a PDF document into the flash swf file hosted on their own site (they dont want to go down the route of converting using online tools)

  2. #2
    newb of many sorts Ralgoth's Avatar
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    As far as I know, flash can't display PDF's. You used to be able to import some PDF's to the stage in flash (w/ flash 8 I believe), but that's the extent of it and that feature has been removed.

    Now the only way I know to get a PDF document over is to open it with Adobe Illustrator, then copy/paste the content in flash. Though, that doesn't sound like the solution you're looking for.
    Search first, asked questions later.

  3. #3
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    thanks for the reply ralgoth, I know there is flash paper which is a work around but I dont know if it works with dynamic pdfs, (i.e. get the filename from a database and pass that along to flash paper swf file)

  4. #4
    newb of many sorts Ralgoth's Avatar
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    FlashPaper would be another option for converting the PDF to flash. But doesn't actually allow a user to view a PDF in flash.
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  5. #5
    Will moderate for beer
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    I think alivepdf should work. It's mostly for pdf generation, but it has import features.

    http://alivepdf.bytearray.org/

  6. #6
    newb of many sorts Ralgoth's Avatar
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    slick.

    Though, it seems that people have only been able to get the PDF import to work in AIR, but I haven't had a chance to try it myself yet.
    Search first, asked questions later.

  7. #7
    Senior Member joshstrike's Avatar
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    I developed a custom solution for this years ago, a Flash-based PDF viewer specifically to allow viewing sensitive corporate documents without giving employees the ability to copy/paste or to view the full page at any time. I used PHP on the server to run pstoedit -- which can open a PDF and convert any given page to a JPG -- then I piped the JPG as a one-time-use file to Flash. I'm sure the state of the art has vastly improved... pstoedit has a lot of flaws (doesn't handle CMYK PDF files, font files need to be loaded in text format...cannot actually parse the text, so for corporate purposes separate index files had to be uploaded so employees could skip to the right chapter and page...) but it might fit the bill for what you're talking about.

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